Quotes by Gloria Steinem (Page 3 of 3)

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

Most women are one man away from welfare.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

What I've learned is that unless it's an emergency, like a fire or brain surgery, hierarchy is not necessary and may be damaging. If you have a hierarchy, you're repeating the strengths and weaknesses of one person without allowing for the accumulative strength of a group.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

After feminism, I suddenly realised: not everyone has to live the same way. Imagine that!

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.

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

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

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

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

Pearl Jam doesn't just sing about issues they care about. These guys walk it like they talk it.

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

The electoral system is not where change starts -- it usually starts in communities and from the bottom up -- but it is where change can be stopped.

The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.

I'm a freelance person, and I've always been able to support myself.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

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

The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look instead of by our heads and our hearts.

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

Having one's traditional role questioned is not a very comfortable experience, perhaps especially for women, who have been able to remain children, and to benefit from work they did not and could not do.

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.

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

We must begin to shift the emphasis of teen-age pregnancy to teen-age boys.

The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary.

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.

If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.

There's no shortage of great young activists.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

All women, and men of color -- we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

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