Best 560 quotes of Gloria Steinem on MyQuotes

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.

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival.

A lot of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the crime, enforcing the law, are also criminals. They've suppressed something in their childhood and they don't want to think they themselves were sexually abused as children or they are abusing their own children and they're sitting on a bench and they either can't admit it, won't admit it, depending on how deeply buried it is.

A man can be called ruthless if he bombs a country to oblivion. A woman can be called ruthless if she puts you on hold.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

A movement happens when people are inspired by somebody, but they do it themselves. You don't wait for someone else. You do it yourself.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

An education is not a thing one gets, but a lifelong process.

Any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble.

Any insistence on equal pay is crucial and any redefinition of work to include caregiving work so that it also has an economic value, at least at replacement level, that's crucial. So change does come from the bottom up, and it will come from girls and women and men who understand that for us all to be human beings instead of being grouped by gender is good for them, too.

Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.

... anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.

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.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.

A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it's reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.

A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks.

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

As a writer and as a human being, Susan Dworkin has always had the ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them irresistibly practical, humorous and human. She makes clear that progress and pleasure go together.

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much-and I’m using it to light the torches of others.

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

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.

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.

Behave like everything you do matters.

Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited.

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.

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.

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.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

Children who have been very sadistically abused over the long-term are able to dissociate, some of them are able to dissociate as a way of surviving and inventing someone to whom this doesn't happen. And so therefore, they invent within themselves different personalities who have life histories of their own. Many people invent an opposite gender personality as well.

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

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.

Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes.

Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.

Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women."

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

During the first suffragist wave in this nation, women were possessions, like a table or a chair. So violence toward them was quite condoned. The attitude has diminished, but it's still there.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country, I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.