Gloria Steinem

I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.

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?

Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.

All those chemicals that create empathy only work when you are in a room together.

Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

I'm lucky I don't make my living in front of the camera.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

Diane Keaton is good for women in and of herself. She's smart and funny and real.

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

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age, are taught to view their bodies as tools to master their environment

The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together.

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.

The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

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.