Gloria Steinem

“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us”

“A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.”

“Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.”

“Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.”

“Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [...] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.”

“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.”

“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”

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

“Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women." ”

“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.”

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

“A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”

“Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage”

“Rich People plan for three generationsPoor people plan for Saturday night”

“One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!”

“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”

“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”

“I do not like to write - I like to have written.”

“Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious. ”

“Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.”

“In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

“Kirjoittaminen on ainoa asia, jota tehdessäni minusta ei tunnu siltä, että minun pitäisi tehdä jotain muuta.”

“we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud”

“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”

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

“no one ever got radicalized by being grateful”

“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.”

“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”

“Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.”

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

“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.”

“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”

“We are becoming the men we wanted to marry”

“However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism muststart with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether thatright is justified by sex, race, class, religion or all four. Howeverfar it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal powerand airtight roles within the family.”

“Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.”

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

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

“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”

“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke . . . She will need her sisterhood.”

“It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.”

“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”

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

“Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.”

“so whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”

“Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men can do." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.”

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

“Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.”