Gloria Steinem Quotes

learning must travel the distance from head to heart.

imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

Inner space is the real frontier.

If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.

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.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

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

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

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

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.

why is the word 'qualified' applied only to those who have to be more so?

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

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.

The point is less what we choose than that we have the power to make a choice.

Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.

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.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

I'm still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about "self-esteem" would have seemed like a luxury.

Some women and men seem to need each other.

I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

It's never to late for a happy childhood.

Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.

women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists.

... 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.

It was the first female-style revolution: no violence and we all went shopping.

When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.

It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

... the art of politics is to be ahead of your time--about six months will do it. Any more than that, and people forget you were there.

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.

Liberation does not come from outside.

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.

Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.

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.

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.

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

Knowing About Victoria Woodhull inspires women to be daring, outrageous and creative.

Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.

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

We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

Male silence is not the same as listening

This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?

The definition of woman's work is shitwork.

God knows (She knows) that women try.