Quotes from Gloria Steinem

Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.

A writer's greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer's greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.

It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.

All my years campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back.

Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.

But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves.

As feminism has changed academia by enlarging what is taught, academia has sometimes changed feminism.

I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.

Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.

Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.

I was the only "girl writer," probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.