Quotes from Gloria Steinem

We are so many selves. It's not just the long-ago child within us who needs tenderness and inclusion, but the person we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms. What brings together these ever-shifting selves of infinite reactions and returnings is this: There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.

It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.

The word 'still' has entered my life. People say to me, 'You're still traveling, you're still wearing blue jeans.

To transform inequality in the outside world, we have to start inside the home. We have to get rid of the old idea that what happens to men is political, and therefore subject to change, but what happens to women is cultural, and therefore can't, or shouldn't, be changed.

This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.

For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.

But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.

When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.

If I could, I would leave an open space for your story on every page.

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.

After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren't already real within us, we couldn't even hope them.

To write is to bring an inner voice into the outer world, to believe that our thoughts are worth entering the thinking of others, and to make real what has never existed in quite the same way before. What could be a better path to self-value than that?

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.

Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.

The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.

Evolution intended us to be travelers….Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been…a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time." —Bruce Chatwin, ANATOMY OF RESTLESSNESS

Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.

As Dr. King once said, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied.

I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.