Quotes from Gloria Steinem

safety. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, "When the slave leaves bondage, his first act is to name himself.

I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one.

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren't so hard anymore.

Nor was he around when I finally understood that having a loving and nurturing father made a lifetime of difference. Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.

The nature and specifics of the negative depend on the part of the country and the year, but the common thread is: self-doubt.

It was the 1950s, and I confused growing up with settling down.

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

People want to come home to the church of their childhood without having to leave their adult selves behind.

childhood memories are prisms, not panes of glass. Details may loom large in the eyes of our smaller selves, while important events lie beyond our vision or understanding.

Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.

I'm beginning to realize the pleasure of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman.

Love is wanting what's best for the other person. Romance is wanting the other person.

Women are becoming the men we wanted to marry (But too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry).

Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism. In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.

Everytime a woman looks in a mirror and criticizes her body, a girl is watching.

Whatever you've imagined your limits of strength and daring to be, the strongest woman in the world can inspire you to go beyond them. That's what champions are for.

I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense—and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?

Like so many daughters who don't yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself as a young woman, "I'm not going to be anything like my mother".

It was a constitutional convention for the female half of the country. After all, we had been excluded from the first one.

Clearly, Columbus never "discovered" America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.

If I had one piece of advice to give to young girls, I would say, "Don't listen to my advice. Listen to the voice inside." It's not important that they know who I am, it's important that they know who they are.

we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But

It seems more hopeful to talk about what came before patriarchy--and could show us a way beyond it.

Progress itself is rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.