Quotes from Gloria Steinem

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down with every year of higher education. We've been studying our own absence.

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them.

When people of color are in the majority instead of the minority, audiences are often the best education that white listeners can have.

Our grief is not a cry for war.

Nothing can replace being in the same space. That's exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else.

Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing you teeth.

Looking at international economic life brings to mind the ancient image of the world riding on the back of a turtle—only in reality, the turtle is a woman. She inches along, laboring just beneath the level of economic visibility, often blaming herself for not being able to bear more weight. Occasionally, she retreats into her shell, as if withdrawal were the only form of rebellion. But only when she upsets its balance will the world roll off her back.

When you're dependent, it's very hard not to be worried about the approval of whoever and whatever you're dependent on. For

for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.

But many of women's body scars have a very different context, and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they're far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.

It wasn't the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday.

living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson's four steps for creating change, in the secret world of prisons or otherwise: There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things. Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.

This new diversity will give us a better understanding of the world and enrich our cultural choices, yet there are people whose sense of identity depends on the old hierarchy. It may just be their fear and guilt talking: What if I am treated as I have treated others? But with all the power and money that is behind it, this backlash could imprison us in a hierarchy all over again. As

As Dr. King once said, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied." If

one major way of ending the feminization of poverty is to attack the masculinization of wealth.

the idea of equality was so contagious that the right wing would soon rate feminism as a danger right up there with secular humanism and godless Communism. The

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

Many of these students have experienced the double discrimination of sex and race—not only in the mainstream but also by race in the women's movement, and by sex in the black power movement.

I still don't see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing anything else.

Having lived his life in the belief that something great could be just around every corner, did he realize for the first time that no more corners could be turned? p.18

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women's absence from quest-for-identity novels, "there's probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she's likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.

You're going to make mistakes, and you will learn from them. Say you're sorry, ask what you could have done better, learn - and move on.