Gloria Steinem Quotes

141 Sourced Quotes

Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it.

Gloria Steinem
Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.

Gloria Steinem
If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.

Gloria Steinem
Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.

Gloria Steinem
I'm at the age when remembering something right away is as good as an orgasm.

Gloria Steinem
Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.

Gloria Steinem
When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

Gloria Steinem
Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing.

Gloria Steinem
In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country — and ourselves — that men can do what women can do.... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.

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

Gloria Steinem
The need to treat ourselves as well as we treat others. It's women's version of the Golden Rule.

Gloria Steinem
The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day. After all, a movement is only people moving.

Gloria Steinem
The act of acting morally is behaving AS IF EVERYTHING WE DO MATTERS.

Gloria Steinem
Human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us — which is both the good news and the bad news.

Gloria Steinem
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.

Gloria Steinem
Pornography is about dominance and often pain. Erotica is about mutuality and always pleasure.

Gloria Steinem
Old or new, this wisdom too often remains in our heads. Only experience can make it a visceral part of our daily lives by bridging the distance from head to heart.

Gloria Steinem
The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.

Gloria Steinem
Without self-esteem, the only change is an exchange of masters; with it, there is no need for masters.

Gloria Steinem
[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

Gloria Steinem
Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.

Gloria Steinem
Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.

Gloria Steinem
The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

Gloria Steinem
I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

Gloria Steinem
But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.

Gloria Steinem
Men were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought) from the outside in.

Gloria Steinem
A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

Gloria Steinem
Anything a powerful group has is perceived as good, no matter what it is, and anything a less powerful group has is not so good, no matter how intrinsically great it might be.

Gloria Steinem
Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

Gloria Steinem
We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

Gloria Steinem