Gloria Steinem Quotes

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.

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.

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.

God knows (She knows) that women try.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example.

Feminism is about friends and sisters and community.

No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.

Most art in the world does not have a capital 'A,' but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions.

Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don't care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.

The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

Whoever has power takes over the noun - and the norm - while the less powerful get an adjective.

... 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.

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.

Now we know that women can do what men can do..., but we don't know that men can do what women can do.

It's a big gift to be recognizable as part of something that matters to people, but that's not the same as being responsible for something.

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.

Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors - anything.

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.

There is no such thing as a crime of passion, only a crime of possession.

One act of violence takes four generations to heal.