Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Voting isn't the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.

There are black doctors and doctors and women novelists and novelists. Any less powerful group gets the adjective, while the powerful group takes the noun. The less powerful group usually knows the more powerful one much better than vice versa. People of color have to understand white people in order to survive; women have had to know men. Only the powerful group can afford to regard the less powerful one as a mystery.

the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it's violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.

Our grief is not a cry for war. "That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.

Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman—how would you divide the housework?

Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

That's why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.

There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.

People now ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that no, I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of others. Because the truth is that the old image of one person with a torch is part of the problem, not the solution. We each need a torch if we are to see where we're going. And together, we create so much more light.

Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger - and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn't usually mean including women.

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.

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.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.

More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.

Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?

In many languages, even the word for human being is "one who goes on migrations." Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.

A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel -- yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.