Gloria Steinem Quotes

Nobody gives you power. Real power is something you take.

I'm interested in exploring how an individual maintains a sense of power in a world that tends to make individuals feel powerless.

A lot of my work concerns a crisis of agency - what can we do?

Everybody eventually discovers that they are an individual with the power to affect their own lives and make it better or not.

You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.

I'm in control of the positions that I allow myself to be in.

We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves.

Men must make their history themselves through their own actions

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

What gives you real power is when you know your power. And I feel quite powerful.

I can control my destiny; I control my life.

Nobody is powerless.

People have power to make a difference in their lives.

Most of society thinks that biography is destiny, that the past equals the future, and of course it does if you live there...but what we really have to remind ourselves is that decision is the ultimate power.

There’s a redemptive power that making a choice has rather than feeling like you’re an effect to all the things that are happening. Make a choice. Just decide what it’s gonna be, who you’re gonna be, how you are going to do it. Just decide. And from that point, the universe will get out of your way.

Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

I never wanted to give up my power. I wanted to be able to make my own decisions, so that's why I became involved in management, bottom line.

History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Understanding one's own power is more interesting than someone being given something powerful.

The biggest superpower you can have is the ability to change your own life. It’s in your hands, and if you believe that you can get the power you want, you can do whatever you wish to do.

That’s what you taught me - we don’t have to accept destiny or Des Tiny. We can create our own future, all of us. We have the power to rule our lives - we just have to make the choice to use it.

You want to be in the driver’s seat of your own life because if you are not, life will drive you.

Yet what keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years--I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.