Gloria Steinem Quotes

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

Oppression is the essence of power.

It is necessary to be very intelligent in the work of oppression.

If given a choice, I would have certainly selected to be what I am: one of the oppressed instead of one of the oppressors.

Oppression has no logic--just a self-fulfilling prophecy, justified by a self-perpetuating system.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

The concept of power we admire is power over someone else.

All oppression creates a state of war.

Might was the measure 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.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

Don't be deceived. There is no justice but strength.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

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

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

A new kind of slavery will emerge. It will probably adopt the cruelest form of domination the community could impose upon the individual and the state upon the community.

[There] are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.

As men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might.

Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted.

The effect of dominance is not always the result of an intention to dominate.