Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Without leaps of the imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning

PLANNING AHEAD IS A measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

Your problem is that you should like yourself better." Of course, he was right—but how could she like herself when she felt she had no self ?

No wonder the romance of Wuthering Heights endures—as do romantic myths in almost every culture. Indeed, the more patriarchal and gender-polarized a culture is, the more addicted to romance. These myths embody our yearning to be whole. No wonder romance so often begins at a physical distance or across a psychic chasm of class and race,* and thrives on death and separation. Projecting our lost qualities onto someone else can be done more easily from a distance.

That's why male adults, and some females too, experience the presence of a strong woman as a dangerous regression to a time of their own vulnerability and dependence.

As Zapata rides to his destiny, his wife hangs on to his boot, dragging in the dust, imploring him to stay home. Since I couldn't yet admit to myself that I was more interested in going to sea and the revolution than in staying home as the mother or the wife, I just vowed silently that I would never become an obstacle to any man's freedom.

Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native myhtologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hieractchical pile and surivive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a break of boundaries who makes us laugh- and laughter lets the sacred it.

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers. Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.

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.

The voting booth is the one place on Earth where the least powerful and the most powerful are equal.

Men can be just as loving and nurturing as women-- it's a libel on men to say they can't-- but we all learn by example. Boys just need nurturing men in their lives so they know it's okay for them to be nurturing.

There is a healthier self within each of us, just wating for encouragement

Women are always saying, "We can do anything that men can do." But men are not saying, "We can do anything that women can do.

Change seems recognizable only after it's happened, like putting one's foot down for a familiar stair—and it's not there.

The media are not reality; reality is reality.

Also India had taught me that change grows from the bottom, like a tree, and that caste or race can double or triple women's oppression.

God may be in the details, but the Goddess is in the connections.

As he always said, "If I don't know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful!

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it.

Just pause, let the audience absorb the hostility, then say, 'I didn't pay him to say that.'

In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also underestimated.

If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves: for our own lives and actions. It is not "women as victims" but women refusing to be victims. What we need, as adults or children, is just one person who has confidence in us, so we can have confidence in ourselves.