Quotes from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“At my age, in this still hierarchical time, people often ask me if I’m “passing the torch.” I explain that I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much—and I’m using it to light the torches of others.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old (“so they will tell me how young I look”), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did (“so they’ll give us seats in the front row”).”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“For sad if obvious reasons, women (especially white women who are seduced by access to the powerful) are the only discriminated-against group whose members seem to think that, if they don’t take themselves seriously, someone else will.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“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.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“When David Susskind and Germaine Greer were guests on the same historic television talk show, for instance, Susskind used general, pseudoscientific statements about women’s monthly emotional changes as a way of excusing the injustices cited by this very intelligent woman. Finally, Greer turned politely to Susskind and said, “Tell me, David. Can you tell if I’m menstruating right now—or not?” She not only eliminated any doubts raised by Susskind’s statements, but subdued his pugnacious style for the rest of the show.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“But, as historian Gerda Lerner has pointed out, it is a shared characteristic of women’s history—or the real history of any marginalized group—to be lost and discovered, lost again and re-discovered, re-lost and re-re-discovered, until the margins have transformed the center. As in a tree or a seed, the margins are where the growth is. Who would want to be anywhere else?”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“If each person in the room promises that in the twenty-four hours beginning the very next day she or he will do at least one outrageous thing in the name of simple justice, then I promise I will, too. It doesn't matter whether the act is as small as saying, "Pick yourself up" (a major step for those of us who have been our family's servants) or as large as calling for a strike. The point is that, if each of us does as promised, we can be pretty sure of two results. First, the world one day later won't be quite the same.
Second, we will have such a good time doing it that we will never again get up in the morning saying, "WILL I do anything outrageous?" but only "WHAT outrageous act will I do today”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“(I remember with gratitude the banner carried by some very old and bawdy women who led the parade while I was a student: hardly a man is now alive, who remembers the girls of ’95.)”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“In retrospect, the second cause for delay makes less feminist sense: the long popularity of assertiveness training. Though most women needed to be more assertive (or even more aggressive, though that word was considered too controversial), many assertiveness courses taught women how to play the existing game, not how to change the rules.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

“It wasn’t the victory of one man or the death of another. It was the death of the future, and of our youth, because we might be rather old before the conservers left and the compassionate men came back. Saturday.”
― Gloria Steinem, quote from Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.