Dubbed the "Mother of Feminism," Gloria Steinem is a woman we can all admire. To celebrate the Ms. Magazine founder's 80th birthday today, we've collected 80 of our favorite inspirational quotes, statements, and epic one-liners from Gloria Steinem:
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.”
“Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.”
“We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.”“I've yet to be on a campus where most women weren't worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I've yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.”
“A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.”
“It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.”“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.”
“So whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.”
“Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.”
“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?”“Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men can do." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.”
“Each others' lives are our best textbooks.”
“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”
“Don't think about making women fit the world—think about making the world fit women."“The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.”
“When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”
“Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”
“I’m a realist, but I’m also a dreamer. And I’m not just a dreamer, I’m a hopeaholic.”
“Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just haven’t been a part of history.”
“There is no such thing as Superwoman. You can’t have everything if you do everything.”
“When unique voices are united in a common cause, they make history.”
“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.”
“I believe that change comes from the bottom, not the top.”
“If women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long?”
“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.”
“I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”
“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day; a movement is only people moving.”
“Men should think twice before making widowhood women’s only path to power.”
“Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.”
“There are really not many jobs that actually require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone.”
“Hope is a very unruly emotion.”
“Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.”
“Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.”
“Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect."
"The first resistance to social change is to say it's not necessary."
“If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.”
"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." "America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people." “No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.”
"We've begun to raise daughters more like sons ... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters." “It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.”
“Someone asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do, and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true and incomplete answer. in fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”
“Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”
“For women...bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly fit. Without these visual references, each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.”“Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.”
"Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age."
“We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.”
“Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren’t, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.”
“Power can be taken, but not given. The process of taking is empowerment in itself.”
“Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.”
“A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”
“On my 70th birthday I was going to get a tramp stamp.”
“I have men brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and the courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.”“However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it
may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family.”
“The surest way to be alone is to get married.” “The predominant response to the women’s movement was ridicule. It took us a long time to be taken seriously enough to be opposed.” “A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.”
“I will no longer be referred to as Miss. Steinem of Ms. Magazine.”
“Don’t worry about what you should do, worry about what you can do.”
“From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence—and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.”
“The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.”
“Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.”
“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.”
“The authority of any institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.”
“Unless we include a job as part of every citizen’s right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else’s idea of what need is.”
“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.”
“The family is the basic cell of the government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.”
“Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described—and will be, after our deaths—by each of the family members who believe they know us.”
“Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”
“We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”
“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
“Marriage: A ceremony in which rings are put on the finger of the lady and through the nose of the gentleman.”
“Logic is in the eye of the logician.”
“Men have a much better time of it than women: for one thing they marry later, for another thing they die earlier.”
“A woman who aspires to be something is called a bitch.”
“We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud.”
“We are still identified by our looks instead of our hearts or heads. That’s why it’s so much better to break the rules. If the rules worked, we’d be able to see it. If women were able to sleep to the top, there would be many more women at the top.”“Now we know that, say, women can do what men can do—most folks would agree with that. But we don’t know that men could do what women can do.”
“I never wanted to be a politician or elected person myself, so I loved to work for other women who did—and hope that more girls will do that. The problem is the feeling that we’re divided from politics, that our vote doesn’t count or what we do doesn’t count. In fact, everything we do counts.”
“It’s still the case that women don’t feel as safe in the streets as men do, or girls don’t as much as boys do, so I think it’s important to say our bodies belong to us, no one else, no one has a right to impose on us physically, nothing justifies it for no reason if we’re not giving it permission.”
Photos: Getty Images Via Elle.com
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