Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger – and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women.”

— Gloria Steinem

452. “Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?”

— Gloria Steinem

453. “Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India – which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse – he could have thought he was in Turkey.”

— Gloria Steinem

454. “It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.”

— Gloria Steinem

455. “God may be in the details, but the Goddess is in the connections.”

— Gloria Steinem

456. “In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.”

— Gloria Steinem

457. “It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

— Gloria Steinem

458. “Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women’s equality is also men’s survival.”

— Gloria Steinem

459. “In the words of so many daughters who don’t yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault, I told myself: I’m not going to be anything like my mother.”

— Gloria Steinem

460. “Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.”

— Gloria Steinem

461. “I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.”

— Gloria Steinem

462. “Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn’t have to talk – and I had been both.”

— Gloria Steinem

463. “It’s not that women are less corruptible than men are, it’s that women have had less chance to become corrupt.”

— Gloria Steinem

464. “White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”

— Gloria Steinem

465. “I was being measured against the expectation that any feminist had to be unattractive in a conventional sense – and then described in contrast to that stereotype. The subtext was: If you could get a man, why would you need equal pay?”

— Gloria Steinem

466. “Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

467. “It’s especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you’re so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.”

— Gloria Steinem

468. “I also noticed that humor was even more of a survival tactic here than in most women’s groups. As one asked: What did Columbus call primitive? Answer: Equal women.”

— Gloria Steinem

469. “In pre-Watergate, pre-sexual revolution times, such stories just weren’t written.”

— Gloria Steinem

470. “If time is relative, doing new things actually makes us feel we’ve lived a longer life.”

— Gloria Steinem

471. “In the same way that individual women are often underestimated, a movement of women is also understimated, but the truth is that, if people realize someone is willing to talk about these deep and daily concerns, they show up.”

— Gloria Steinem

472. “Among their first questions was said to be: Where are the women?”

— Gloria Steinem

473. “I can go on the road – because I can come home. I come home – because I’m free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other.”

— Gloria Steinem

474. “Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.”

— Gloria Steinem

475. “Prejudice marks a mental landmine.”

— Gloria Steinem

476. “Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.”

— Gloria Steinem

477. “I’m also now immune to politicians who say, “I’ve traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know... ” I’ve traveled more than any of them, and I don’t know.”

— Gloria Steinem

478. “So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.”

— Gloria Steinem

479. “I took a part-time editing job to pay the rent. It was work I could do at home, but when suddenly I was expected to spend two days a week in the office, I quit, bought an ice cream cone, and walked the sunny streets of Manhattan.”

— Gloria Steinem

480. “Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.”

— Gloria Steinem

481. “I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.”

— Gloria Steinem

482. “Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.”

— Gloria Steinem

483. “The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.”

— Gloria Steinem

484. “She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears.”

— Gloria Steinem

485. “There is a healthier self within each of us, just wating for encouragement.”

— Gloria Steinem

486. “What we’re told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.”

— Gloria Steinem

487. “I’ve noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I’m energized by listening to people’s stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That’s the work of an organizer.”

— Gloria Steinem

488. “As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous.”

— Gloria Steinem

489. “I never quite trust futurists because I think they’re kind of telling us what they think our future should be.”

— Gloria Steinem

490. “Sometimes when I’m in the midst of all this, I can hear my mother saying, ‘Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing your teeth.”

— Gloria Steinem

491. “Laughter is a rescue. p.204.”

— Gloria Steinem

492. “Always look at what people do, not who they are.”

— Gloria Steinem

493. “The idea that women are ‘our own worst enemies’ forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted too.”

— Gloria Steinem

494. “Secrets have power only as long as they are secret.”

— Gloria Steinem

495. “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.”

— Gloria Steinem

496. “In fact, there are many unique satisfactions here. One is that Americans seem to outstrip every nation for hope. Perhaps because so many of us came in flight from something worse, or rose from poverty here, or absorbed the fact and fiction of the “land of opportunity,” or just because optimism itself is contagious – whatever the reason, hopefulness is what I miss the most when I’m not here. It’s the thing that makes me glad to come home. After all, hope is a form of planning.”

— Gloria Steinem

497. “Male silence is not the same as listening.”

— Gloria Steinem

498. “If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.”

— Gloria Steinem

499. “In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.”

— Gloria Steinem

500. “How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility?”

— Gloria Steinem