Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Roots cannot exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots.

Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.

Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn't have to talk—and I had been both.

wisdom they taught me: If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

Recently, an Ethiopian and several Kenyan drivers have sounded a bigger alarm. As one said, "I never thought I would see a second wave of colonialism, but there is one and it's Chinese. Our countries are becoming wholly owned subsidiaries of China.

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.

We don't win by imitating what we're against.

Altogether I've seen enough change to have faith that more will come.

Just because we all have wombs doesn't mean we have to be mothers, just like we all have vocal cords doesn't mean we're all opera singers.

This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It's been reaching out all along, I just wasn't paying attention.

When I'm traveling, I'm often confronted by a middle-aged white man who says something like "A black woman took my job." My answer is always "Who said it was your job?" The problem is his sense of entitlement.

Now when I'm asked with condescension why I don't drive, I just say: Beacause adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

I am left without answers. There are only questions I must answer for myself. What is the balance between home and the road? Hearth and horizon? Between what is and what could be?

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

We are linked, not ranked.

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.

It's as if attentive people create a magnetic force field for stor- ies the tellers themselves didn't know they had within them.

I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful.

In my own college life, I got through four years as a government major without learning that women were not just "given" the vote, that the real number of slave rebellions was suppressed because rebelling was contagious, or that the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy.

Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening

Power can be taken but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Not only had I never made any such complaints, but at political meetings, I had given my suggestions to whatever man was sitting next to me, knowing that if a man offered them, they would be taken more seriously. You white women, Mrs. Greene said kindly, as if reading my mind, if you don't stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?

This street quote actually was made into a T-shirt. Erotica is a word that can differentiate sex from violence and rescue mutual sexual pleasure. It comes from the Greek root eros, meaning "love," and has no gender. Pornography comes from porne, meaning "female sex slave." They are as different as a room with doors open and a room with doors locked. Until we finally separate sexuality from aggression, there will be way more pornography than erotica

The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me.