Top 693 Quotes & Sayings by Gloria Steinem

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

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.

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

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.

Law and justice are not always the same.

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

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.

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

It's easier to blame the person with less power.

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.

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.

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

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

The surest way to be alone is to get married.

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

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

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

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

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

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

Most women are one man away from welfare.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.

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

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

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.

Nothing changes the gender equation more significantly than women's economic freedom.

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

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.

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

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Being misunderstood by people whose opinions you value is absolutely the most painful.

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

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

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

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

The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.

I was the first woman to speak ever at the National Press Club, and they gave me a necktie.

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

I'm so happy that we're finally hearing the stories and voices of women who make America. We do what we see, not what we're told, so an incomplete story of this country damages everyone.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

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?

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

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

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

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

A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves.

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

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

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

Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences.

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.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

Burnout is a way of telling you that your form of activism was perhaps not very full circle.

Perfect is boring: Beauty is irregular.

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

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

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

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

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.