Gloria Steinem Thinking Quotations

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.

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true. I think for a lot of men, too - certainly for most women - there's enough real conflict without manufacturing it. The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be ten sides.

I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don't separate laughter and seriousness.

I have always employed humor, and I think it's absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion.

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.

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.

I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.

The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.

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.

The road has been viewed as a male turf. If you think of the classic "Odyssey," of, you know, classical literature or Jack Kerouac or almost any road story, it's really about a man on the road. There's an assumption that the road is too dangerous for women.

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

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.

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.

What we have been raised to think of as inevitable - division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states - actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.

I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don't think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.

Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's agethat familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth oridentity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.

If the men in the room would only think how they would feel graduating with a 'spinster of arts' degree they would see how important this is.

... if young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.

... if you're a woman, all they can think about your relationship with a politician is that you're either sleeping with him or advising him about clothes.

It's especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you're so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

We do what we see and what we're told. If we haven't been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don't have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it's not only natural but inevitable.

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome."

It doesn't matter what word we use, if it has the same content, it will be treated in the same way. There are other words - there's "womanist," there's "mujerista," there's "women's liberationist" - all mean the same thing and they get the same ridicule. I think we just need to choose what word we feel comfortable with that says women are full human beings, and whatever that word is, it will get a lot of opposition. But it will also attract a lot of support. But this is a revolution, not a public relations movement.

People say, 'Oh, you've sacrificed so much, now's the time to do something for yourself.' I mean, please - that is so wrong. I don't think I've sacrificed one f-king thing.

If you can learn to like how you look, and not the way you think you look, it can set you free.

I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland.

Reporters immediately push their interviewees into the most extreme version by saying in a shocked tone, 'Well, are you saying that ..." They're trying to make people be as hostile and opposed to each other as possible because they think only conflict is news.

I think we acquire habits of mind when we're little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.

I'm clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I'm holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I'm holding everyone's hand.

I think of the future in two ways - survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.

I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities.

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people.

When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders.

I just think that culturally, women - we're all human beings - but at least we don't have our masculinity to prove.

I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible.

Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them.

I think we're all enmeshed in this political system that is devoted to controlling reproduction. You didn't invent it; I didn't invent it. Thirty percent of us are trying to preserve it, and 70 percent are trying to change it. We're not active enough or voting enough or mad enough.

I think that part of everybody's success is due to their looks, but it just works in different ways. If you're whatever society calls attractive, then people say that you got ahead because of your looks-especially if you're a woman. If you're whatever society says is not attractive, then they say you got ahead because you're compensating, you couldn't get a man or whatever. So everybody pays the same penalty for the fact that women are assessed for their outsides rather than for what's in our heads and our hearts.