Quotes from Gloria Steinem

I was angry because young men in politics were treated like rising stars and young women were treated like - well - young women. {...} I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.

However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.

Even the dictionary defines adventurer as "a person who has, enjoys, or seeks adventures," but adventuress is "a woman who uses unscrupulous means in order to gain wealth or social position.

The root of oppression is the loss of memory.

Not even in a movie had I ever seen a wife with a journey of her own. Marriage was always the happy end, not the beginning. It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.

Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.

Anyone who believes we're living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history.

On the road, I learned that the media are not reality; reality is reality.

We learn most where we know the least.

Only food and water are more important than music and privacy

Always look at what people do, not who they are.

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: 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? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life--a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.

In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.

The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I've ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, "Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!

I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.

Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it. Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.

I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know..." I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

I've learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.