Quotes from Gloria Steinem

I'm beginning to realize the pleasure of being a nothing-to-lose, take-no-shit older woman.

Whatever you've imagined your limits of strength and daring to be, the strongest woman in the world can inspire you to go beyond them. That's what champions are for.

They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South.

If I don't know what will happen tomorrow, it could be wonderful.

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel... Taking to the road — by which I mean letting the road take you — changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories —in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

Just because we all have wombs doesn't mean we have to be mothers, just like we all have vocal cords doesn't mean we're all opera singers.

This vertical history feels more intimate and sensory than written history. It's been reaching out all along, I just wasn't paying attention.

It's as if attentive people create a magnetic force field for stor- ies the tellers themselves didn't know they had within them.

This street quote actually was made into a T-shirt. Erotica is a word that can differentiate sex from violence and rescue mutual sexual pleasure. It comes from the Greek root eros, meaning "love," and has no gender. Pornography comes from porne, meaning "female sex slave." They are as different as a room with doors open and a room with doors locked. Until we finally separate sexuality from aggression, there will be way more pornography than erotica

The older I get, the more intensely I feel about the world around me.

Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing you teeth.

Love is wanting what's best for the other person. Romance is wanting the other person.