Gloria Steinem Quotes (73 Quotes)


    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.

    I am not now, and never have been, a girl friend of Henry Kissinger

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

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

    If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.



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

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

    However 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, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

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


    Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

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

    Most women's magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

    What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

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

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

    Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.


    . . . as for logic, it's in the eye of the logician.

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

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

    It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

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

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

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

    Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.


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

    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?


    From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

    For women... bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can't possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.

    Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.

    Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do, and I gave the common-sensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

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

    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.

    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.

    That is almost impossible to do -- to prove that a pregnancy would literally cause you to lose your life.

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

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


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

    I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

    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.

    For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

    It's important not to stigmatize the word Republican, because the great tragedy is an extremist group has taken over one of our great parties.

    I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.

    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.

    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.


    More Gloria Steinem Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Woman - Man - Power - Work & Career - Family - Money & Wealth - Marriage - Children - Justice - Education - People - Life - Change - Law & Regulation - World - Planning - Home - Space - Sex - View All Gloria Steinem Quotations

    Related Authors


    Noam Chomsky - Will Marshall - Van Jones - Scott Nearing - Louis Farrakhan - Jesse Jackson - Heather Mills - Gloria Steinem - Florence Nightingale - Cesar Chavez


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