Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If women could sleep their way to the top, there’d be a lot more women at the top.”

— Gloria Steinem

52. “If what’s inside your dreams wasn’t already real inside you, you couldn’t even dream it.”

— Gloria Steinem

53. “Inner space is the real frontier.”

— Gloria Steinem

54. “Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

55. “Power in this country is often like hemophilia; it passes through women and then men get it.”

— Gloria Steinem

56. “Self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”

— Gloria Steinem

57. “People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.”

— Gloria Steinem

58. “I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.”

— Gloria Steinem

59. “Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it’s limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don’t rank.”

— Gloria Steinem

60. “Girls are taught to view their bodies as unending projects to work on, whereas boys from a young age, are taught to view their bodies as tools to master their environment.”

— Gloria Steinem

61. “There’s no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.”

— Gloria Steinem

62. “An education is not a thing one gets, but a lifelong process.”

— Gloria Steinem

63. “When you attempt something new, there’s always fear. A couple of helpful slogans to me are “follow the fear” or “fear is a sign of growth.””

— Gloria Steinem

64. “When unique voices are united in a common cause, they make history.”

— Gloria Steinem

65. “No, I’ll take responsibility for my own life, I am going to make a decision. And you know, to this day, I would raise flags on all public buildings to celebrate the chance I had to make that decision.”

— Gloria Steinem

66. “Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.”

— Gloria Steinem

67. “There’s no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.”

— Gloria Steinem

68. “It’s a fundamental human right to decide to have children or not to have children.”

— Gloria Steinem

69. “Feminism is about friends and sisters and community.”

— Gloria Steinem

70. “To me, the model of success is not linear. Success is completing the full circle of yourself.”

— Gloria Steinem

71. “Whoever has power takes over the noun – and the norm – while the less powerful get an adjective.”

— Gloria Steinem

72. “Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.”

— Gloria Steinem

73. “Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited.”

— Gloria Steinem

74. “Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence – and just as adventurous.”

— Gloria Steinem

75. “Helping begins with listening.”

— Gloria Steinem

76. “Someone once asked me why women don’t gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don’t have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”

— Gloria Steinem

77. “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

78. “We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs.”

— Gloria Steinem

79. “It feels as if childhood sexual abuse or domestic abuse of women in the home has increased but actually if you ask women of 60 or 70 years old, the incidence is about the same. We just didn’t know it.”

— Gloria Steinem

80. “Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.”

— Gloria Steinem

81. “I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.”

— Gloria Steinem

82. “Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.”

— Gloria Steinem

83. “The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example.”

— Gloria Steinem

84. “Gratitude never radicalized anybody. I don’t care if they recognize the past, I just want them to get angry about the present and keep going.”

— Gloria Steinem

85. “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”

— Gloria Steinem

86. “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

87. “One act of violence takes four generations to heal.”

— Gloria Steinem

88. “God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there’s no turning back.”

— Gloria Steinem

89. “Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one’s self.”

— Gloria Steinem

90. “The point of the journey is not just healing. It’s also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.”

— Gloria Steinem

91. “We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.”

— Gloria Steinem

92. “Battered women is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.”

— Gloria Steinem

93. “I have me brave women who are exploring the outer edge of human possibility, with no history to guide them, and with a courage to make themselves vulnerable that I find moving beyond words.”

— Gloria Steinem

94. “Remember: “For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost.” This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn’t count.”

— Gloria Steinem

95. “Human beings are communal beings and we can’t exist or prosper by ourselves. We need each other’s support.”

— Gloria Steinem

96. “If you love your work, I’m not sure you have hobbies. I try to say no to things that other people could do and only say yes to things that only I could do.”

— Gloria Steinem

97. “The simple right to reproductive freedom – to sexuality as an expression that is separable from reproduction – is basic to restoring women’s power, the balance between women and men, and a balance between humans and nature.”

— Gloria Steinem

98. “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and you think it’s a pig, it’s a pig.”

— Gloria Steinem

99. “You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who’s younger than you, who weighs less than you.”

— Gloria Steinem

100. “In the late ’60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.”

— Gloria Steinem