Top 693 Quotes & Sayings by Gloria Steinem - Page 2

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.

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

Everything about aging in my experience so far has been a plus. Except the death part!

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

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

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

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.

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

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was - and that my real parents were going to come get me.

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 ask men about their body image, they will tell you they look better than they do. And if you ask a woman, she'll tell you she looks worse.

Whatever each individual woman is facing - only she knows her biggest challenge.

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

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

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

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

Perfectionism attaches to what is valued in the culture.

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.

I looked up affirmative action once in Wikipedia, and it said, 'A measure by which white men are discriminated against,' and I got so mad.

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

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

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

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

To say 'radical feminist' is only a way of indicating that I believe the sexual caste system is a root of race and class and other divisions.

I am not patient.

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

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.

Part of the reason that women go to college is to get out of the food service, clerical, pink-collar ghetto and into a more white-collar job. That does not necessarily mean they are being paid more than the blue-collar jobs men have.

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

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The AIDS crisis has brought us a consciousness of the immune system as the most important health-maintenance element, and a consciousness of how it is under attack.

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.

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.

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.

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.