Quotes By Gloria Steinem

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

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.

I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.

If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn't it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Law and justice are not always the same.

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.

A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

I'd like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I'd have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.