Gloria Steinem Quotes

I've noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I'm energized by listening to people's stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That's the work of an organizer.

Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.

If you think about Martin Luther King and others in the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, they were all college-educated, middle class people. Nobody tries to diminish the Civil Rights movement by saying they were middle class. It’s true that the National Organization for Women in its early years was white middle class. But once it was joined by younger women from civil rights groups like SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) it changed profoundly. In any case, my life’s ambition is to make white women as smart as black women. Because the group of women who still vote against their own self-interest are white married women.

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane’s time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself — all those turn out to be as important to a child’s development as all but the most basic food and shelter.

Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.

We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176

The root of oppression is the loss of memory.

I think the revolutionary role of a writer is to make language that makes coalition possible, language that makes us see things in a new way.

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

People now ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that no, I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of others.

Because the truth is that the old image of one person with a torch is part of the problem, not the solution. We each need a torch if we are to see where we're going.

And together, we create so much more light.

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.

More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.

In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.