Gloria Steinem Quotes

American activist and journalist (born 1934)

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Gloria Marie Steinem (born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970s. A prominent writer and key counterculture era political figure, Steinem has founded many organizations and projects and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. She is a former columnist for New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine.

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Birth Name: Gloria Marie Steinem

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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.

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality.

To transform inequality in the outside world, we have to start inside the home. We have to get rid of the old idea that what happens to men is political, and therefore subject to change, but what happens to women is cultural, and therefore can’t, or shouldn’t, be changed.

How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?

So I talk about original cultures that saw the presence of god in all living things- including women. Only in the last five hundred to five thousand years- depending on where we live in the world- has godliness been withdrawn from particular races of men, all in order to allow the conquering of nature, females, and certain races of men. Though patriarchal cultures and religions have made hierarchy seem inevitable, humans for 95 percent of history have been more likely to see the circle as our natural paradigm.

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

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.

we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.

For women, the only alternative to being a feminist is being a masochist.

The word 'still' has entered my life. People say to me, 'You're still traveling, you're still wearing blue jeans.

You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel — yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.

Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.

"But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

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