Gloria Steinem Quotes

Quote #1

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

Quote #2

“Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.”

Quote #3

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

Quote #4

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

Quote #5

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

Quote #6

“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”

 Quote #7

“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”

Quote #8

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

Quote #9

“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”

Quote #10

“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”

Quote #11

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

Quote #12

“Laughter is a rescue.”

Quote #13

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

 Quote #14

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

Quote #15

“Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.”

Quote #16

“As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.”

Quote #17

“Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men can do." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.”

Quote #18

“I do not like to write - I like to have written.”

Quote #19

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

Quote #20

“When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”

 Quote #21

“America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”

Quote #22

“Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.”

Quote #23

“Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

 Quote #24

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

Quote #25

“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.”

Quote #26

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

Quote #27

“Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”

Quote #28

“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.”

Quote #29

“Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.”

Quote #31

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

Quote #32

“If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.”

Quote #34

“Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.

Quote #35

“A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.”

Quote #36

“Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.”

Quote #37

“Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.”

Quote #38

“Always ask the turtle.”

Quote #39

“no one ever got radicalized by being grateful”

Quote #40

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”

Quote #41

“I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.”

Quote #42

“Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.”

Quote #43

“The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”

Quote #44

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

Quote #45

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

Quote #46

“It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Quote #47

“Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.”

Quote #48

“After all, hope is a form of planning.”

Quote #49

“Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.”

Quote #50

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”

Quote #51

“Anyone who believes we’re living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.”

Quote #52

“Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,”

Quote #53

“On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.”

Quote #54

“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.”

Quote #55

“Always look at what people do, not who they are.”

Quote #56

“Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.”

Quote #57

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.”

Quote #58

“I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.”

Quote #59

“We learn most where we know the least.”

Quote #60

“I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.”

Quote #61

“Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.”

Quote #62

“We are so different, yet so much the same.”

Quote #63

“Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.”

Quote #64

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

Quote #65

“Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.”

Quote #66

“According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence.”

Quote #67

“Sometimes when I'm in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, 'Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.”

Quote #68

“Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?”

Quote #69

“I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.”

Quote #70

“Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.”

Quote #71

“And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.”

Quote #72

“Our grief is not a cry for war.”

Quote #73

“Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.”

Quote #74

“This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.”

Quote #75

“More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.”

Quote #76

“We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful."

Quote #77

“During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect.”

Quote #78

“The word 'still' has entered my life. People say to me, 'You're still traveling, you're still wearing blue jeans.”

Quote #79

“Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.”

Quote #80

“When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.”