Gloria Steinem

You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules

I think we each come out of the womb with some unique way of looking at the world and if we don't express it, we loose faith in ourselves.

Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.

Voting isn't the most we can do, but it is the least.

Citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform countries, it is the basis of any real democracy.

"You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice

I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.