Quotes from Gloria Steinem

The best thing about self-defense is knowing there is a self

writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal. It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are.

I always thought of my road life as temporary, assuming that one day I would grow up and settle down. Now I realized that for me, the road was permanent, and settling down was temporary. Traveling had created my nonroad life, not the other way around.

the elderly man from the ashram, explained to me, if the villagers wanted peace, they would feed and house the peacemakers. If they didn't want peace, no outsiders could help anyway. As we started on our journey, I noticed that without possessions, I felt oddly free.

Taking to the road - by which I mean letting the road take you - changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories - in short, out of our heads and into our hearts. It's right up there with life-threatening emergencies and truly mutual sex as a way of being fully alive in the present.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and you think it's a pig, it's a pig.

The truth was that I had internalized society's unserious estimate of all that was female - including myself.

Whether we work to live, as most of us do, or live to work, as some of us are lucky enough to do, work doesn't have to be a four-letter word. It can and should be a source of belonging, growth, and pleasure.

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.

He took comfort in not knowing about the future.

I confused growing up with settling down.

Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman - perhaps especially a traveling feminist - becomes a kind of celestial bartender.

This is all the more important today when we have world leaders who don't respect differences. That lack of respect is a dictatorship.

There are events that divide our life into before and after.

I was more interested in going to sea and the revolution than in staying home as the mother or the wife.

Pound for pound, she was stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

We're not having a revolution, but an evolution.

Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules.

the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary

I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.

the clearest view is always from the bottom. Kennedy

Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.

In the words of so many daughters who don't yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault