Gloria Steinem

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

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.

The same way that racism is a white person's problem, violence against women is a men's problem.

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

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child; therefore, take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54,' then it's another story.

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

I was never against marriage per se. Before feminism, I didn't think you had any choice. In fact, for a long time I always assumed I would get married. I just didn't see any marriages I wanted to emulate, so I kept putting it off.

People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We're clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven't reached true democracy yet.

If you are not a feminist in love, you fail to recognise someone who does not love you. Feminism makes love easier. Otherwise, there is the danger of feeling romantically drawn to someone who does not see you as an equal.

Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they're ashamed of.

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?

What happens at 50, more or less, you lose what you need to create another person, to sustain another person; you keep what you need to sustain yourself. And there's something wonderful about that.

The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home. There are many ways of supporting that, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all caregiving and making that amount tax deductible.

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

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It's time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers.

Obviously, there is much similarity among the challenges of transgender people and all women - from health care to harassment to discrimination in the workplace.

The surest way to be alone is to get married.

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, 'Just wait.'

The only thing I can't stand is discomfort.

Age brings a freedom. When you're young, you're much more subject to the idea of what feminine is or how you should look or how you should behave.

I hate to generalize, but in general, both men and women suffer from ageism. Men much less because men gain power as they get older. Women lose power as they get older. Men are seen as gaining experience and being distinguished. Sons look forward to replacing their fathers.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.

The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

Women are liked better when they lose.

If women have young children, they are one man away from welfare.

Law and justice are not always the same.

I think if women are visible in the media, truly visible, in an empowered role, it empowers us to be more visible in any area of our lives.

Until the masculine role is humanized, women will tend to be much better at solving dangerous conflicts.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

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.

There is nothing more fundamental than the idea that the government does not have a right to decide when and whether we have children.