Gloria Steinem Quotes

The political is personal.

An education is not a thing one gets, but a lifelong process.

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

Thank you for all your good and beautiful work.

There's more variation among human groups than between human groups.

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.

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.

Women and men are equal human beings.

I believe that art has incredible power.

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.

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

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.

I would say don't worry about what you should do, do whatever you can. And seek companions with shared values.

We have to know before we can act.

If we're isolated, we come to feel powerless when we're not.

We move away from only the binary boxes of "masculine" or "feminine" and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

In art, women could never get training. They couldn't get their work out into the world even when they could get training.

I hate when people say, "Have fun at the press preview." Fun is talking to you.

Feminism isn't whatever you want it to be.

You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.

The problem with Superwoman is that she has to do it all, inside the home and outside the home. If there is a man there doing half of it, that's a different world.

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.

I think that there is clearly an understanding that the women's market is an important market. It's still often perceived as separate when it's not.

Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way. I mean if we want approval, we have to sing the blues, even as singers we sing the blues.

It's not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There's opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.

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.

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

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

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.

Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power.

When you attempt something new, there's always fear. A couple of helpful slogans to me are "follow the fear" or "fear is a sign of growth."

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

Religion is often politics made sacred.

I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.

Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it's amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.

You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you.

The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.

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

Frequently people just vote for the party out of power because they're disappointed or angry at what is happening at the moment.

We'll only really know we've succeeded when a mediocre woman does as well as a mediocre man. You shouldn't have to be extraordinary. That's the point!

When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.

I never expected to be even busier at 81, and doing more of what I love, than when I was 30.

We all have good instincts unless they're beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood.

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

Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to.

Everyone is unique and each experience is different.

It's a fundamental human right to decide to have children or not to have children.

Most books are bought by women.