Gloria Steinem Quotations | Page 2

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.

Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.

I hope to live to 100. There is so much to do.

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.

Children are short people. Some you like, some you don't.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

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.

The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or Twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on.

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.

Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.

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.

Secretary of state is far superior to vice president, because it's involved in continuously solving problems and making policy and not being on standby.

Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys.

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.

I can say whatever it is that I feel.

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

It's heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves.

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.

A majority of Americans want redemption for racism - for our terrible, destructive racist past - and so see a vote for Obama as redemptive.

Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women - or the welfare of anyone - depending on who controls it.

As for the American child's classic problem - too much mother, too little father - that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.

Female inferiority is internalised by us. Women need a lot more confidence.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.

The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys.

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was, and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

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.

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man.

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies - not all of them, but many of them - 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

In Sweden, both parents take care of the children.

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.

For twenty years, not a week went by when I wasn't on a plane.

I was the first woman to speak ever at the National Press Club, and they gave me a necktie.

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.'

I'm lucky I don't make my living in front of the camera.

If you're going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they're ashamed of.

One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.

Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them.

I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

The women's movement in England was totally against Margaret Thatcher.

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress. The majority consciousness has changed, and often that has made very clear, practical changes in our daily lives, but the centers of power are still not occupied, for the most part, by this new consciousness.

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

What's so valuable about HBO is they tell stories. We learn from stories.

When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie down and take a break.

You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.

The mark, to me, of a constructive argument is one that looks at a specific problem and says, 'What shall we do about this?' And a nonconstructive one is one that tries to label people.

Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.

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.

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.

'Ms.' always flouted the rules of the ad world that say, especially for products directed at women, that the ad must be connected to the editorial. You don't have food ads unless you have recipes. You don't get clothing ads unless you have lavish fashion coverage. We never did that; every other women's magazine does.

The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack.

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.

What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person; you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that.

What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.

One thing is sure. Women and girls will have their first vision of a female network anchor who is an authority on her own. Since we learn by example, there's no telling where that iconic image may lead.

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power

Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

Someone asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

The art of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.

It's important not to stigmatize the word Republican, because the great tragedy is an extremist group has taken over one of our great parties.

That is almost impossible to do -- to prove that a pregnancy would literally cause you to lose your life.

I am not now, and never have been, a girl friend of Henry Kissinger

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.

When I'm talking to people, I find myself quoting the three organizing rules of Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter was initiated by three young women, and too few people know that. But, anyway, the first one is lead with love. The second is low ego, high impact. The third is move with the speed of trust. I must say those make me feel very hopeful for the future.

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.

The power of the state stops at our skins. They can't restrict contraception [or] abortion. They can't take our kidneys. Bodily integrity is a principle.

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

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 art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us