Gloria Steinem Quotes

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

People look back on those days through a thick veil of nostalgia, but life was hard if you were anything other than a rich, powerful white male

Privilege is the greatest enemy of right.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.

I am from the class that has, in a sense, benefited from the status quo, but everyone still gets victimized.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Justice often means taking power from some who have it and giving it to some who do not.

The defeats and victories for the people at the top aren't defeats and victories for the people at the bottom.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

The people who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

Only powerful people have liberty.

It's always going to be a fight for anyone who isn't an older white man. I want to fight for anyone who doesn't have a fight.

It is always the right of the mighty which prevails over the weak, and that is very primitive.

Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.

In practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.

In the South, people in power feel they don't have to answer to no one.

Steal a loaf of bread and they hang you, steal a land and they'll make you king.

The great have private feelings of their own, to which the interests of humanity and justice must curtsy. Their interests are so far from being the same as those of the community, that they are in direct and necessary opposition to them; their power is at the expense of OUR weakness; their riches of OUR poverty; their pride of OUR degradation; their splendour of OUR wretchedness; their tyranny of OUR servitude.

The worries that are the burden of which the privileged person makes an excuse in dealing with the oppressed person are in fact the worries about preserving his privileged condition.

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.

The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.