Gloria Steinem > Quotes

“It's time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.”
― Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words: Essays on Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking the Boundaries of Gender

“if you don’t stand up for yourselves, how can you stand up for anybody else?”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Feminism... (is) not about one woman getting a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.”
― Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion

“I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime—working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“We're also learning that the most dangerous time often comes after a victory.”
― Gloria Steinem

“Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“but I grew to love these spontaneous gatherings in shopping malls, university bookstores, and specialty bookshops that couldn't be replaced by the big chains, all the spaces with coffee, comfortable chairs, and the presence of books that allow people to browse and discover interests they didn't know they had.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides. Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don’t.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our “need for distraction, our mania for the new.”1 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.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“A quote is the essence of a story. We all need stories to convey ideas, justice, anger, humanity, hope, laughter, learning, and whatever makes us understand or feel understood”
― Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion

“Or perhaps it's "activist," but on environmental and economic problems, without understanding that pressuring women to have too many children is the biggest cause of environmental distress, and economic courses should start with reproduction, not just production.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Adalah revolusionar bagi perempuan untuk menyanyikan kepedihan, tapi lebih lagi bila ia menyanyikan seluruh lagu kehidupan”
― gloria steinem

“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel like I should be doing something else.”
― Gloria Steinem

“Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.”
― Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within

“The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“There is a small wooden viewing tower, and pamphlets from the State of Ohio, but they focus on facts—for instance, the Serpent Mound is as long as four football fields—not on meaning. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen, a Native poet, mythologist, and scholar, explains that Serpent Woman was one of the names of the quintessential original spirit “that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind…she is both Mother and Father to all people and all creatures. She is the only creator of thought, and thought precedes creation.”

In Western mythology, she might be compared to Medusa, the serpent-haired Greek goddess whose name means Knowing Woman or Protectress. She once was all-powerful—until patriarchy came along in the form of a mythic young man who chopped off her head. He was told to do this by Athena, who sprang full-blown from the mind of her father, Zeus—a goddess thought up by patriarchy and therefore motherless. There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“The problem for all women is we're identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.”
― Gloria Steinem

“Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“There is no virtue in being on the same page if it's the wrong page.”
― Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: Thoughts on Life, Love, and Rebellion

“In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

“Power is being redefined. Women often explain with care that we mean power to control our lives, but not to dominate others.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“Rhyming in itself is magic.”
― Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road