Gloria Steinem

The thing about aging is all your old lovers, pretty much if they were really friends, become your family. It's great. You have those terrible feelings of possessiveness and uncertainty go out the window. You have what you shared. You know you would help each other in times of trouble no matter what.

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.

Feminism began to dawn on my brain belatedly in life.

Liberation does not come from outside.

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

Work is valued by the social value of the worker.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.

The point of the journey is not just healing. It's also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.

There's really a shortage of good freelance writers. ... There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don't turn it in or they turn it in and it's rotten; it's amazing. Somebody who's even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well.

I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.