Quotes from Gloria Steinem

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. 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.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Maybe U.S. policy makers should talk to taxi drivers.

What Julia Ward Howe had in mind in 1870 when she invented Mother's Day for Peace was a day on which we oppose war and advance peace.

When a stranger comes up to me in the street and tells me that something in life is better because of a movement I'm part of, it is way more satisfying than a fancy house or car.

Let this message go forth from Houston and spread all over this land. There is a new force, a new understanding, a new sisterhood against all injustice that has been born here. We will not be divided and defeated again!"14

it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn't like.

this country is transforming before our eyes. In thirty years or so, the majority will no longer be European Americans; the first generation of mostly babies of color has already been born. 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?

campuses not only help create social justice movements, they need them.

I remember with gratitude the banner carried by some very old and bawdy women who led the parade while I was a student: hardly a man is now alive, who remembers the girls of '95.)

In short, these rebels punished their families, but only in the traditionally feminine way: they punished themselves.

the majority of all tranquilizer prescriptions are written for women.

I became a person whose friends and hopes were as spread out as my life. It just felt natural that the one common element in that life was the road.

For the future we should understand that this process of democratizing a state legislative system takes time. Changing a few faces is not enough, just as earning majority support of a legislator's constituents doesn't help if he has been put there by special interests. You have to be around long enough to out-organize the special interests, and change the legislature's leadership.

the word still entered my life - as in "Oh, you're still travelling" ...

if you've experience discrimination in one form, you're more likely to recognise it in another.

hope is a form of planning.

to making revolution, not just dinner.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good." Somerset Maugham.

People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn't seem to exist before patriarchy;

As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did begin the "I have a dream" litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—Tell it! What would be most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.

she seemed both proud and scared that I was where she had once wished to be.

the design of many patriarchal religious buildings resembles the body of a woman. Think about it: there is an outer and inner entrance (labia majora, labia minora) with a vestibule between (an anatomical as well as architectural term) and a vaginal aisle up the center of the church to the altar (the womb) with two curved (ovarian) structures on either side. The altar or womb is where all-male priests confer everlasting life—and who can prove that they don't?

Between what is and what could be?