Quotes from Gloria Steinem

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row").

The simple right to reproductive freedom—to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction—is basic to restoring women's power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.

Our brains are organized by narrative and image.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

When a stranger comes up to me in the street and tells me that something in life is better because of a movement I'm part of, it is way more satisfying than a fancy house or car.

it was just that prejudiced people linked together things they didn't like.

In short, these rebels punished their families, but only in the traditionally feminine way: they punished themselves.

if you've experience discrimination in one form, you're more likely to recognise it in another.

People nod at the idea that when God is depicted only as a white man, only white men seem godly. They laugh at the idea that priests dressed in skirts try to trump women's birth-giving power by baptizing with imitation birth fluid, calling us reborn, and going women one better by promising everlasting life. Indeed, elaborate concepts of Heaven and Hell didn't seem to exist before patriarchy;

As King ended his speech, I heard Mahalia Jackson call out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" And he did begin the "I have a dream" litany from memory, with the crowd calling out to him after each image—Tell it! What would be most remembered had been least planned. I hoped Mrs. Greene heard a woman speak up—and make all the difference.

Between what is and what could be?

Yet, I doubt he would have chosen such a risky life if he hadn't been fleeing an orderly one.