Gloria Steinem Quotes

Kirjoittaminen on ainoa asia, jota tehdessäni minusta ei tunnu siltä, että minun pitäisi tehdä jotain muuta.

YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. — Native Elders

Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset. But the ones who were performing were making jokes on themselves usually and now that’s changed. So there are no rules exactly but I think if you see a whole group of people only being self-deprecating, it’s a problem. But I have always employed humor, and I think it’s absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion. I mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent — it’s like the Stockholm syndrome. But you can’t compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too. I think it was Einstein who said he had to be careful when he shaved because if he thought of something suddenly, he’d laugh and cut himself. So I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don’t separate laughter and seriousness. There’s none of this kind of false Episcopalian solemnity.

It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

the 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.

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

"Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count."

In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.

So with a lot of difficulty, I picked up this huge snapping turtle and slowly carried it down the road to the river.

Just as I had slipped it into the water and was watching it swim away, my geology professor came up behind me. “You know,” he said quietly, “that turtle has probably spent a month crawling up the dirt path to lay its eggs in the mud on the side of the road — you have just put it back in the river.”

I felt terrible. I couldn’t believe what I had done, but it was too late. It took me many more years to realize this parable had taught me the first rule of organizing.

Always ask the turtle.

"You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it."

I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word. It seems to me that it means you believe in the great potential and the best of human beings, so I didn’t have to overcome anything to accept this award; it seemed an unmitigated honor. And since the ultra-right wing has tried so hard to make it a bad word— “humanist” has been demonized in much the same way that the word “feminist” has — it seemed especially important to identify as humanist and support humanist groups.