Gloria Steinem Quotes

Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.

In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.

Flo especially took me in hand. When I felt I had to prove the existence of discrimination with statistics, for instance, she pulled me aside. 'If you're lying in the ditch with a truck on your ankle,' she said patiently, 'you don't send someone to the library to find out how much the truck weighs. You get it off!

In Indian Country,” he says, “we have a different sense of time. I’m learning and you’re learning—and more will.

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.

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.

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.

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

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

We teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

After all, hope is a form of planning.

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

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.

But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

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.

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.

I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.

One of the saddest things I hear as I travel is "I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

To be just, a law has to be flexible.

The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.

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

You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79

Most women are one man away from welfare.

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.

Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste--- and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.

I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women's groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.

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

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.

The idea that women are 'our own worst enemies' forces us to admit that we don't have the power to be, even if we wanted too.

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

There are really not many jobs that actually acquire a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.

Laughter is the only free emotion - the only one that can't be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we're in love because, if we're kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality...laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.

In the 1970s, while researching in the Library of Congress, I found an obscure history of religious architecture that assumed a fact as if it were common knowledge: the traditional design of most patriarchal buildings of worship imitates the female body. Thus, there is an outer and inner entrance, labia majora and labia minora; a central vaginal aisle toward the altar; two curved ovarian structures on either side; and then in the sacred center, the altar or womb, where the miracle takes place - where males gives birth.Though this comparison was new to to me, it struck home like a rock down a well. Of course, I thought. The central ceremony of patriarchal religions is one in which men take over the yoni-power of creation by giving birth symbolically. No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin - because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life. No wonder the male priesthood tries to keep women away from the altar, just as women are kept away from control of our own powers of reproduction. Symbolic or real, it's all devoted to controlling the power that resides in the female body.

It's important for someone who could play the game - and win - to say: 'the game isn't worth shit.

Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

Father Egan continues to write about everything from the injustice of current wars to the past and future of Catholic mysticism.In the Catholic Reporter, he publishes an article titled "Celibacy, a Vague Old Cross on Priestly Backs", and explains that it started "only in 1139 when the church no longer wanted to be financially responsible for the children of priests.

I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.

I can go on the road - and I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued int he presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot."See that purple Harley out there—that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!"On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.We have only to discover it—and ride.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

hate generalizes, love specifies

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.

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here's an idea for theorists and logicians: 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? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

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.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine", so we suppress it-until it overflows.

In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry

For me writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (i) when I'm doing it I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and once in a while pride and (3) it's frightening.