Gloria steinem quotes

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome."

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

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

We choose to be writers because we don't want to talk.

Oppression has no logic--just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

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.

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

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.

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

I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.

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

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

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

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

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

There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.

People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.

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.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

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.

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

There's a wonderful cartoon of Reagan in a Western hat and he's saying, "A pregnant woman in every home, a gun in every holster. Make America a man again." That sums up his attitudes: pro-military, anti-equality, pro-rich, anti-poor.

Nothing will happen automatically. Change depends on what you and I do every day.

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

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

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

If [George] Zimmerman had been arrested for domestic violence, Trayvon Martin might still be alive.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

The U.S. has more guns per capita and supplies more guns to the world than any other country. What would be a fistfight without guns turns into dead bodies with them. Families with guns in the house are more likely to shoot themselves accidentally than to shoot any intruder. Women abused by their partners have a five-fold increased risk of being killed when their partner owns a gun. Every three hours, at least one child is wounded or killed by gunfire.

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.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So, if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, just wait.

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

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

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."

[on sexual politics] The Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.

Sexism is not inevitable. It's only about controlling reproduction and therefore controlling women.

when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it's very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.

I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

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.

How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

If we're by ourselves we come to feel crazy and alone. We need to make alternate families of small groups of women who support each other, talk to each other regularly, can speak their truths and their experiences and find they're not alone in them, that other women have them, too ... It makes such a huge difference.

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.

I wouldn't want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that's sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you're smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.

learning must travel the distance from head to heart.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

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

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

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.

Behave like everything you do matters.

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.

What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

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.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.

Inner space is the real frontier.

Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.

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

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

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

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

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

You are the leader you've been waiting for.

Helping begins with listening.

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

When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

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

Whatever a 'superior' group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever an 'inferior' group has will be used to justify its plight. Black men were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'stronger' than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be 'weaker.

A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

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

If you can learn to like how you look, and not the way you think you look, it can set you free.

Self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.

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

What I think we need to do is infuse everyday and every action with the kind of values we hope will be in the future, with kindness, with nurturing, with dreams, ambition, using your talents, not resorting to violence, other forms of conflict resolution, with humor, with poetry, with music.

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.

It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.

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

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

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.

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

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.

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.

Voting isn't the most we can do. But it is the least.

It's the biggest economic influence in a woman's life whether she can decide when and whether to have children or not.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

We need to raise our sons more like our daughters. We need to relieve them of this burden of the idea that to be masculine they have to be superior, which is what they get addicted to, and why both racism and sexism are crimes that I call superiority crimes.

Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.

We've learned that women can and should do 'men's jobs,' for instance, and we've won the principle (if not the fact) of getting equal pay. But we haven't yet established the principle (much less the fact) that men can and should do 'women's jobs': that homemaking and child-rearing are as much a man's responsibility, too, and that those jobs in which women are concentrated outside the home would probably be better paid if more men became secretaries, file clerks, and nurses, too.

Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.

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

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

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Whatever you want to do,do it now.

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.

There are two types of people in the world, those who say 'there are two types of people in the world' and those who don't.

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.

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.

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