Quotes by Gloria Steinem
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I was not considered beautiful before I was a feminist. I was a pretty girl before, but suddenly, after I was publicly identified as a feminist, I was beautiful. So, many people were really commenting on what they thought feminists looked like.

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.

I don't think there's any country that has equal pay, not even Sweden or Iceland.

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

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

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

Democracy is mob rule with income taxes.

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

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

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

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

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

Anger is energizing. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward.

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day.

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

A good friendship is a conversation that never ends.

The art of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.

Gerda Lerner was fierce, brilliant and unique. She lived history by her bravery, restored history by her scholarship, and democratized its study by her activism.

The Constitution did not mention women when it was first written, and it still doesn't.

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress.

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.'

As long as working women also have to do the work of child and family care at home, they will have two jobs instead of one. Perhaps more important, children will grow up thinking that only women can be loving and nurturing, and men cannot.

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.

There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female.

Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?'

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.

As for the American child's classic problem -- too much mother, too little father -- that would be cured by an equalization of parental responsibility.

I'm not saying that women leaders would eliminate violence. We are not more moral than men; we are only uncorrupted by power so far. When we do acquire power, we might turn out to have an equal impulse toward aggression.

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.

What is frustrating is being told that no matter how hard I've worked, it counts less than my appearance. Although if you're not considered conventionally attractive, that also becomes an issue: you know, you're a feminist because you couldn't get a man.

Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.

I keep thinking: 'Georgia O'Keeffe wouldn't have had Botox.'

The surest way to be alone is to get married.

The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.

Women are liked better when they lose.

Women are more than smart enough to see that McCain's policies are a disaster... He is anti- every reproductive issue we've ever fought for.

What we need to be able to do is count all human experience. So I would like to count the secretarial positions as good training places to take over the jobs of the bosses.

I'm lucky I don't make my living in front of the camera.

How could you not love Norman Mailer? He was a total chauvinist, but also so vulnerable.

The Native American cultures on this continent, most of them, were matrilineal, and some women were the chiefs. Societies were about balance.

Women tend to need the healthcare system more because we bear children. Insurance companies -- not all of them, but many of them -- 'gender-rate.' Women may pay 40% more for their health insurance than men do.

Rich cultures, patriarchal cultures, value thin women, like ours; poor ones value fat women. But all patriarchal cultures value weak women. So for women to become physically strong is very profound.

We are still behaving as if a worker really doesn't have a family because the work pattern really was meant for men who really were the financial support but weren't looking after their families. We need to change this, and we can easily do that.

Liberation does not come from outside.

There's nothing automatic about political change, about liberation.

Because we are communal creatures, if you're with people who think you're smart, you're smart, and if they think you're dumb, you're dumb.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

When I'm talking to groups that are all men, we talk about how the masculine role limits them. They often want to talk about how they missed having real fathers, real loving, present fathers, because of the way that they tried to fit the picture of masculinity.

Anything can be used for or against the welfare of women -- or the welfare of anyone -- depending on who controls it.

When I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian, I asked for a couch in the office because I liked to lie down and take a break.

I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

What's so valuable about HBO is they tell stories. We learn from stories.

You can compel fear. You can even make someone feel they're in love if they're isolated and dependent for long enough. But laughter is free.

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.

Actually, I believe there are more independents than either Republicans or Democrats, and yet those are the... that is the choice we have on the party ballot.

These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted, they think.

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.

In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage -- often on religious grounds.

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.

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.

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

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

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

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

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?

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

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

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.