Gloria Steinem Quotations | Page 5

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.

Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.

The old languages - at least the ones I know - don't have gender. They don't have gendered pronouns. There's no "he" and "she." A human being is a human being.

The ends and means are a seamless web.

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

No, I'll take responsibility for my own life, I am going to make a decision. And you know, to this day, I would raise flags on all public buildings to celebrate the chance I had to make that decision.

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.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Writers - we're a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least, I do.

Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.

How can I combine career and family?

I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

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

If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this.

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

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.

Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole...patriarch!

It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn't know it.

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

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

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

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

You're a unique person. You should do what you're suited to do. We all should. It's the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It's external.

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

... 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.

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.

You're afraid to be close to women. Because it's not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child.

I would say that each of us has only one thing to gain from the feminist movement: Our whole humanity. Because gender has wrongly told us that some things are masculine and some things are feminine... which is bullshit.

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.

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

We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.

If you really want to be lonely, get married.

... 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.

... we've allowed a youth-centered culture to leave us so estranged from our future selves that, when asked about the years beyondfifty, sixty, or seventy--all part of the average human life span providing we can escape hunger, violence, and other epidemics--many people can see only a blank screen, or one on which they project fear of disease and democracy.

... if young women have a problem, it's only that they think there's no problem.

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

Feminism is not antisexuality. On the contrary. It says that sexuality shouldn't be confused with violence and dominance and that it should be a matter of free choice. It shouldn't be forced on you by economics, including dependence on a husband, or by pressure.

Religion is often politics made sacred.

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

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

If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.

Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?

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

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

The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.

To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.

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

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.

One act of violence takes four generations to heal.

It's obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women's movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.

The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education.

More women are becoming the men they wanted to marry, but too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. That leaves most women with two jobs, one outside the home and one in it ...

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.

Human beings are communal beings and we can't exist or prosper by ourselves. We need each other's support.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

I feel this is very much our spiritual and political duty to be part of every peace table, it has often been the case that citizenry -- women and men -- can make progress when it is not possible for the officials to be able to meet at that moment in time.

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.

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

Male silence is not the same as listening

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.

The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.

Women must have seats at the table because peace is too crucial to be left only to the politicians or only to the male half of our world.

Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.

Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.

You are the leader you've been waiting for.

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

When you say something in a wrong group - it will never be right, so you can not say anything wrong, when you don't belong to a group.

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.

I don't like writing. I like having written.

I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.

Thank you for all your good and beautiful work.

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

Think about the pressure to "pass" by lying about one's agethat familiar temptation to falsify a condition of one's birth oridentity and pretend to be part of a more favored group. Fair-skinned blacks invented "passing" as a term, Jews escaping anti-Semitism perfected the art, and the sexual closet continues the punishment, but pretending to be a younger age is probably the most encouraged form of "passing," with the least organized support for "coming out" as one's true generational self.

I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don't think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.

... 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.

In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker's productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband's pain and suffering.

I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

You can't be what you can't see, so it's harder for women to say, "I'm going to be a [presidential] candidate," so we need to go to women who would be good candidates and say, "You would be a good candidate and I'll help you." It's not a passive question, it's not when will it happen, but an active question, when will we make it happen?

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

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

If you follow the voice inside you, it does give you guidance.

The women's movement and gay and lesbian movements always come together, and our adversaries are always the same because the male supremacist, patriarchal, ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalists, whatever you want to call it is devoted to saying that sex is only moral and okay when it is directed towards having children and occurs in patriarchal marriage, so the children are owned.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

Behave like everything you do matters.

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

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

The political is personal.

the patterns that are normalized in the family - the whole idea that some people cook and some people eat, that some listen and others talk, and even that some people control others in very economic or even violent ways - that kind of hierarchy is what makes us vulnerable to believing in class hierarchy, to believing in racial hierarchy, and so on.

Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing.

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

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

It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.

Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank.

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