Gloria Steinem Quotations | Page 3

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Why are solutions not just as newsworthy as problems? The notion that hostility is necessary all the time to create interest and news is not going to help us [humanity] come to agreements and solve the huge problems we have.

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

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

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.

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change.

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.

I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

Whenever one person stands up and says, “Wait a minute, this is wrong,” it helps other people do the same.

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying.

... patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all--even as we forge different individual choices within them--just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.

[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

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

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.

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.

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

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

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset.

Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are still the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and safe abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction.

There is no such thing as Superwoman. You cant have everything if you do everything.

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 guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin.

I've only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn't have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That's so rare.

It turns out that we literally don't empathize unless we're physically present - that the oxytocin, the famous "tend and befriend" hormone is not produced unless we're present with all five senses.

We are still in various kinds of patriarchal systems. The very definition of patriarchy is that men control women as the means of reproduction, so the idea that a woman's main role is to have children often means society wants more workers, more soldiers. The idea that how many children we have should be controlled by the family, the church, the nation - by anyone but women themselves - is still very deep and very strong.

The highest use of the Web is getting the information and identifying the places and the possibility of being together physically.

Rich People plan for three generations Poor people plan for Saturday night

No one can give us power. If we aren’t part of the process of taking it, we won’t be strong enough to use it.

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

So whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.

Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.

If women could sleep their way to the top, there'd be a lot more women at the top.

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.

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

When you stand up for yourself and try to be autonomous and self-determining, you're called a lot of names that we all know and that are very common. You may lose your job. You may lose custody of your child. You may be blamed for the failure of your marriage even though it was the man who couldn't tolerate an equal relationship.

Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age, are taught to view their bodies as tools to master their environment

When unique voices are united in a common cause, they make history.

Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just havent been a part of history.

Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.

The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future

Helping begins with listening.

They would say well there's always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn't true in all cultures. It doesn't have to be true. And the first step is imaging.

What would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

In order to make a choice, you need the power to see there is one.

If you add up all the forms of genocide, from female infanticide and genital mutilation to so-called honor crimes, sex trafficking, and domestic abuse, everything, we lose about 6 million humans every year just because they were born female. That's a holocaust every year.

We have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it.

I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.

Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.

Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.

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.

Someone once 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 but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

We're changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.

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

Feminism starts out being very simple, and it ends up being a world view that questions hierarchy altogether.

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.

Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.

I do not like to write - I like to have written.

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.

no one ever got radicalized by being grateful

Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage

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.

Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.

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.

Where men come to and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence.

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.

Inner space is the real frontier.

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.

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.

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.

The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.

It's hard to measure success when we're dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.

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.

I'm completely happy not having children. I mean, everybody does not have to live in the same way. And as somebody said, 'Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.

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.

We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.

If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.

I don't want to die saying but, you know? There's so much I want to do, so I want more time.

... members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.

Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men cando." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

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

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.

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

Most writers write to say something about other people - and it doesn't last. Good writers write to find out about themselves - and it lasts forever.

I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.