Gloria Steinem famous quotes

At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much-and I’m using it to light the torches of others.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Light #People #Age

The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Unique #Feminism #Purpose

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

#Daughter #Courage #Honesty

I never quite trust futurists because I think they're kind of telling us what they think our future should be.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Thinking #Never Quit #Kind

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

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

Whatever each individual woman is facing; only she knows her biggest challenge. However, if we add up the problems that affect the biggest numbers of women, then issues having to do with physical safety and reproduction are still the biggest. Female bodies are still the battleground, whether that means restricting freedom, birth control and safe abortion in order to turn them into factories, or abandoning female infants because females are less valuable for everything other than reproduction.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Mean #Order #Numbers

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

#Inspirational #Leadership #Fun

I guess 35 years ago, I thought we had more of a democracy than we actually do. Majority support doesn't help unless the majority is active and votes - but the opposition minority votes a much greater proportion, so we often lose by a narrow margin.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Years #Support #Democracy

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

#Law #Justice #Steps

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Thinking #Names #People

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us
-- Gloria Steinem

#Art #Life Is

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Mean #Race #Class

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Dream #Believe #Long

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Past #People #Laughing

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Positive #Dream #Planning

I have always employed humor, and I think it's absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Thinking #Emotion #Employed

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

#Jobs #Sex #Feminism

I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don't separate laughter and seriousness.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Laughter #Native American #Thinking

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

#Women #Feminist #Humanity

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Children #Mean #Men

I do not like to write - I like to have written.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Writing #Creative Writing

Reporters immediately push their interviewees into the most extreme version by saying in a shocked tone, 'Well, are you saying that ..." They're trying to make people be as hostile and opposed to each other as possible because they think only conflict is news.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Thinking #People #Trying

Most women are one man away from welfare.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Men #Feminist #Feminism

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

#America #Cupcakes #People

Rich People plan for three generations Poor people plan for Saturday night
-- Gloria Steinem

#Inspirational #Success #Night

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

#Helping Others #People #Waiting

I just think that culturally, women - we're all human beings - but at least we don't have our masculinity to prove.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Thinking #Masculinity #Prove

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.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Men #Becoming #He Man

Why are solutions not just as newsworthy as problems? The notion that hostility is necessary all the time to create interest and news is not going to help us [humanity] come to agreements and solve the huge problems we have.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Agreement #Humanity #News

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Race #Feminism #Helping

The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true. I think for a lot of men, too - certainly for most women - there's enough real conflict without manufacturing it. The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be ten sides.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Real #Men #Thinking

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Believe #Writing

The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Fun #Men #Ideas

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Past #Answers #Problem

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Numbers #Freedom Of Speech #Democracy

There is no such thing as Superwoman. You cant have everything if you do everything.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Superwoman

Probably those three things affect the most people: reproductive freedom, freedom from violence, and democratic families. But there may well be someone sitting at this table who has a great idea to do something else that wouldn't come under those umbrellas and that would really be great, and make all kinds of change.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Ideas #People #Three

Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just havent been a part of history.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Past #Equal

I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Long #Humanist #Bad Word

The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don't know what's going to matter in the future
-- Gloria Steinem

#Ideas #Want #Matter

When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Men #Thinking #Leader

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Art #Might #Matter

I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people."
-- Gloria Steinem

#Religious #Believe #People

We're changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.
-- Gloria Steinem

#World #Changing The World #Fit

People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Teacher #Long #People

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

#Reading #Feminist #Feminism

I've only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn't have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That's so rare.
-- Gloria Steinem

#Pimp #Free Will #Mets

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

#Money #Giving #Watches

Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren't blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we're very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what's inside you?
-- Gloria Steinem

#Unique #Support #Brain