Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Quotes

“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“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.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn't matter whether the act is as small as saying, "Pick yourself up" (a major step for those of us who have been our family's servants) or as large as calling for a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won't be quite the same.
Second, we will have such a good time doing it that we will never again get up in the morning saying, "WILL I do anything outrageous?" but only "WHAT outrageous act will I do today”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“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

“Perhaps that's the first Survival Lesson we need to remember if we are to keep going: serious opposition is a measure of success. Women have been trained to measure our effectiveness in love and approval, not in conflict and resistance.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“PLANNING AHEAD IS A measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“When David Susskind and Germaine Greer were guests on the same historic television talk show, for instance, Susskind used general, pseudoscientific statements about women’s monthly emotional changes as a way of excusing the injustices cited by this very intelligent woman. Finally, Greer turned politely to Susskind and said, “Tell me, David. Can you tell if I’m menstruating right now—or not?” She not only eliminated any doubts raised by Susskind’s statements, but subdued his pugnacious style for the rest of the show.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“It doesn’t matter if you love the people society says you shouldn’t love or do or don’t have children with more than one of them; it doesn’t matter if you have money, go to church, or obey the law; what matters is that you’re not cruel or wasteful, that you don’t keep the truth from those who need it, suppress someone’s will or talent, take more than you need from nature, or fail to use your own talent and will.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“It wasn’t the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“Patriarchy in all its forms is still about controlling reproduction, and thus the bodies of women, which is why invading a female body is still less likely to be punished by law than invading private property.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“(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.)”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“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.”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old (“so they will tell me how young I look”), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did (“so they’ll give us seats in the front row”).”
― Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions