Gloria Steinem

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother - so I wouldn't be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally.

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

The most hurtful thing is not what comes from our adversaries, it's what comes from our friends.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

If you hear a statistic, you will make up a story to go with it, because our brains are organized on narrative. And you may very well make up a wrong story because you only have one fact, which is a statistic.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

The question of whether one has one's own political power or goes to work for someone else is not only a feminist question.

After feminism, I suddenly realised: not everyone has to live the same way. Imagine that!

There's been the same kind of demonizing of the word 'feminism' as words like 'liberal,' 'affirmative action,' and so on.

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

I didn't go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

In a general way, anything that affects men is taken more seriously than anything that affects only women.

It's heartbreaking to watch people working against themselves.

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.

I want to help correct the inaccurate image of immigration in the media. There is an idea that women's issues are over here and immigration is over there. Three quarters of undocumented workers are women and children.

One's enemies are always talking about 'post-feminism.' It is a word invented by people who would like to do away with feminism.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

Because women of color were more likely to be in the paid labor force, they were more likely to recognize discrimination, so they were always leading the women's movement.