Gloria Steinem Quotes (73 Quotes)

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

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

make dinner, not war.

Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.

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

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

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

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

Men should think twice before making widow hood woman's only path to power.

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

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

One thing is sure. Women and girls will have their first vision of a female network anchor who is an authority on her own. Since we learn by example, there's no telling where that iconic image may lead.