Quotes from Gloria Steinem

if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

Power is being redefined. Women often explain with care that we mean power to control our lives, but not to dominate others.

Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.

Perhaps that's the first Survival Lesson we need to remember if we are to keep going: serious opposition is a measure of success. Women have been trained to measure our effectiveness in love and approval, not in conflict and resistance.

In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.

She didn't put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.

Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.

I pray for the courage To walk naked At any age To wear red and purple, To be unladylike, Inappropriate, Scandalous and incorrect To the very end.

All movements need a few people who can't be fired.

The simple right to reproductive freedom - to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction - is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.

Our current plight is not made inevitable by human nature. What once was could be again—in a new way.

Rhyming in itself is magic.

The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.

Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don't have to put on an act. If I'm not feminine enough for someone, I don't care, because femininity is different in everyone's mind.

As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.

Your daughters are watching you.

It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.

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

There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then

We're also learning that the most dangerous time often comes after a victory.

Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?

As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.

I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us- which is both the good and the bad news.