Quotes from Gloria Steinem

We are all trained to be female impersonators.

If someone called me a lesbian—in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians—I learned just to say, "Thank you." It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.

We are so different, yet so much the same.

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.

YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —Native Elders

Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey—and to be welcomed when she comes home.

Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.

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.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.

Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

racism and sexism are intertwined [...] and cannot be uprooted separately.

Sometimes when I'm in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, 'Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.

I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie's novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.

Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.

According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What

In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we've laughed.

Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

Feminism is memory.

In most societies, a woman is encouraged to give birth to another person more than she is encouraged to give birth to herself.