1,066 Quotes by Gloria Steinem

It’s especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you’re so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.

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.

I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said ‘maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.’ It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously – or pretended to – but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our “need for distraction, our mania for the new.”1 In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.

Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.

I’m more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don’t feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I’ve felt pressure when reporters asked me, “Do you believe in God?” I do say, “No. I believe in people.”