1,066 Quotes by Gloria Steinem

The first step toward speaking for others is speaking for ourselves.

But, as historian Gerda Lerner has pointed out, it is a shared characteristic of women’s history – or the real history of any marginalized group – to be lost and discovered, lost again and re-discovered, re-lost and re-re-discovered, until the margins have transformed the center. As in a tree or a seed, the margins are where the growth is. Who would want to be anywhere else?

If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.

Rhyming in itself is magic.

Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don’t care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.

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

Laughter is a rescue. p.204.

I can go on the road – because I can come home. I come home – because I’m free to leave. 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.

Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hierarchical pile and survive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a breaker of boundaries who makes us laugh – and laughter lets the sacred in. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.