1,066 Quotes by Gloria Steinem

The first problem for all of us, men and woman, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.

As a writer and as a human being, Susan Dworkin has always had the ability to draw us into new dreams of justice, and to make them irresistibly practical, humorous and human. She makes clear that progress and pleasure go together.

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.

The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

Fashion in the past meant conforming and losing oneself. Fashion in the present means being individual and finding oneself.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

[On the Internet and activism:] The danger of the Internet is cocooning with the like-minded online - of sending an email or twitter and confusing that with action - while the real corporate and military and government centers of power go right on. In a way, the highest purpose of the Internet is to bring us together for empathy and action. After all, the reflector cells and empathy-producing chemicals in our brains only work when we're physically together with all five senses. You can't raise a baby online.

That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them.

A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it's reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.