Top 100 Gloria Steinem Quotes
#1. Marriage was always the happening end, not the beginning.
Gloria Steinem
#2. Patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all
even as we forge different individual choices within them
just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.
Gloria Steinem
#4. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.
Gloria Steinem
#6. She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.
Gloria Steinem
#7. When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.
Gloria Steinem
#8. We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.
Gloria Steinem
#9. It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.
Gloria Steinem
#10. Nothing will happen automatically. Change depends on what you and I do every day.
Gloria Steinem
#11. Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.
Gloria Steinem
#12. Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.
Gloria Steinem
#13. If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.
Gloria Steinem
#14. In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
Gloria Steinem
#15. Racism and sexism are intertwined [ ... ] and cannot be uprooted separately.
Gloria Steinem
#16. I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.
Gloria Steinem
#17. Oppression has no logic
just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.
Gloria Steinem
#18. Maybe U.S. policy makers should talk to taxi drivers.
Gloria Steinem
#19. Your problem is that you should like yourself better." Of course, he was right - but how could she like herself when she felt she had no self ?
Gloria Steinem
#20. Not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day.
Gloria Steinem
#21. All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.
Gloria Steinem
#22. Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.
Gloria Steinem
#23. It wasn't the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday.
Gloria Steinem
#24. Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.
Gloria Steinem
#26. No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
Gloria Steinem
#27. I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.
Gloria Steinem
#28. Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.
Gloria Steinem
#30. Self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.
Gloria Steinem
#31. I'm not black on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and a woman on Thursday, Friday and Saturday
Gloria Steinem
#33. I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'
Gloria Steinem
#34. Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.
Gloria Steinem
#35. Instead, we talked about the reasons to support political leaders who support us, never mind party labels. It was the kind of campaigning only a movement could do.
Gloria Steinem
#36. I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.
Gloria Steinem
#37. Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.
Gloria Steinem
#38. We need to take violence against women seriously. It is the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent inside itself, and whether it will be militarily violent against another country.
Gloria Steinem
#39. But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child
a true self who is waiting.
Gloria Steinem
#41. The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.
Gloria Steinem
#42. I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.
Gloria Steinem
#44. The power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls
Gloria Steinem
#45. Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.
Gloria Steinem
#47. Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.
Gloria Steinem
#48. Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.
Gloria Steinem
#50. For women, all women, whatever our sexuality, it's crucial to our health that we are able to separate sexuality from reproduction. I mean whether or not we can control when we give birth is the biggest element in our health, our education, our economic welfare, our life expectancy, everything.
Gloria Steinem
#51. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Gloria Steinem
#52. I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.
Gloria Steinem
#53. Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.
Gloria Steinem
#54. Change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.
Gloria Steinem
#55. In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.
Gloria Steinem
#56. I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money.
Gloria Steinem
#57. It's as if attentive
people create a magnetic force field for stor-
ies the tellers themselves didn't know they
had within them.
Gloria Steinem
#58. A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.
Gloria Steinem
#59. As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.
Gloria Steinem
#60. It's endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together. It makes everything else boring, actually.
Gloria Steinem
#61. I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.
Gloria Steinem
#63. All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.
Gloria Steinem
#64. If women could sleep their way to the top, there'd be a lot more women at the top.
Gloria Steinem
#65. Punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.
Gloria Steinem
#66. How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.
Gloria Steinem
#67. Children are short people. Some you like, some you don't.
Gloria Steinem
#68. Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
Gloria Steinem
#69. Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself ... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.
Gloria Steinem
#70. We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It's absurd. We're arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.
Gloria Steinem
#72. The less powerful group usually knows the powerful one much better than vice versa - blacks have had to understand whites in order to survive, women have had to know men - yet the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.
Gloria Steinem
#73. You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.
Gloria Steinem
#74. Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.
Gloria Steinem
#75. Society definitely encourages and condones men's violence toward women. Not as much as it used to be when it was less visible, and there were still laws on the books that made it alright for men to beat their wives, as long as it was within certain limits, and women were chattel.
Gloria Steinem
#76. We feel very celebratory and positive that we have created a voyage across the DMZ in peace and reconciliation that was said to be impossible.
Gloria Steinem
#77. One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.
Gloria Steinem
#78. I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.
Gloria Steinem
#79. I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime - working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.
Gloria Steinem
#80. Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.
Gloria Steinem
#81. Looking at traditional marriages, it seems the surest way for a woman to be alone is to get married.
Gloria Steinem
#82. Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.
Gloria Steinem
#83. There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.
Gloria Steinem
#84. God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.
Gloria Steinem
#85. It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.
Gloria Steinem
#86. I know that lack of contact creates more lack of contact, and contact creates more contact, or at least an ability to talk to with each other.
Gloria Steinem
#87. If we keep on talking about masculine and feminine and following those stereotypes, then we will make women suppress and despise their so called masculine qualities and men suppress and despise their so called feminine ones, and that's where all the trouble starts.
Gloria Steinem
#89. Everyone is unique and each experience is different.
Gloria Steinem
#91. I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.
Gloria Steinem
#92. There is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.
Gloria Steinem
#93. When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.
Gloria Steinem
#94. Anything being perceived as being superior takes the noun. And everything that isn't, that's judged to be inferior, requires an adjective. So there are black novelists and novelists. There are women physicians and physicians. Male nurses and nurses.
Gloria Steinem
#95. Even the dictionary defines adventurer as "a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures," but adventuress is "a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.
Gloria Steinem
#96. The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.
Gloria Steinem
#97. No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you're working your ass off, then you don't want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you.
Gloria Steinem
#98. There is no better moment in life than finding the right word.
Gloria Steinem
#99. Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'
Gloria Steinem
#100. Sadomasochiasm - which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse - is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.
Gloria Steinem
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