Gloria Steinem Quotes

Quotes by and about Gloria Steinem

(Continued from her main entry on the site.)

Steinem: "Be authentic. No role playing. ... Bond on your real interests, don't pretend."

Steinem: "Watch out for ... stereotypes [and] always remember you're dealing with a person, not a group."

Steinem: "[Strive to] see the uniqueness of each individual whether or not it confirms to any of the labels."

Steinem: "I just want to ... get us out of thinking of each other as categories - including generational categories."

Steinem: "Revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before."

Steinem: "I notice that so much of the research money now is going into [research on] sex differences ... that of course they are finding differences. They used to do it with race, and they got shamed out of it, but now they're doing it with sex."

Steinem: "[In my youth I found that] there was no shortage of things to demonstrate against."

Steinem: "Some of us have no guilt or reluctance whatsoever to fight against male privilege and dominance because we come from a race and a class where the guys are dominating other people too, so we don't have a qualm in the world about it, we understand it's a good thing."

Steinem: "I am sure we all know that this country imprisons a greater percentage of its population than any other country on Earth. And that it's all about race, and it's all about class, and it's all about the cult of masculinity. ... There are corporations making profit from those prisons."

Steinem: "[Mohamed Atta was] ridiculed by this authoritarian ... father who told him that even his older sisters were more masculine than he. He became addicted to proving his masculinity. How clear is that?"

Steinem: "If we listen to each other's stories, and we figure out what changes will help the biggest number of people, then we come out with both better changes, and more community."

Steinem: "It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks."

Steinem: "Revolutions that last don't happen from the top down. They happen from the bottom up."

Steinem: "Each one of us is unique. ... The truth of the matter is that the individual is more different from the next individual than a group is from a group."

Steinem: "There are more differences between two individual females, or members of the same ethnic group or race, than there are between males and females, or between races and ethnic groups. Each one of us in this room is a unique combination of millennia upon millennia of heredity and environment combined in a way that could never have happened before and could never happen again."

Steinem: "Anybody who has ever met a baby knows there's a person already in that baby - right? And our job ... is to help them become who they are already are."

Steinem: "A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

Newsweek: "[She has demonstrated great] skill as a popularizer of difficult ideas."

Christine Stansell: "[She] was to the women's movement what Martin Luther King Jr. was to civil rights: the galvanizer."

Steinem: "If you're cynical, you're defeated ... [but] it's good to be skeptical."

Steinem: "[My editor] was so convinced that I was nothing like [the typical female] that he used to hand me a manuscript and say, 'Pretend you're a woman and read this!'"