Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
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101. “Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So, if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, just wait.”

— Gloria Steinem

102. “No one can give us power. If we aren’t part of the process of taking it, we won’t be strong enough to use it.”

— Gloria Steinem

103. “Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

105. “After all, hope is a form of planning. If our hopes weren’t already real within us, we couldn’t even hope them.”

— Gloria Steinem

106. “The phenomenon of the woman who’s asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, “I don’t know. What do you want to see?” It’s a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, “This is what I want.””

— Gloria Steinem

107. “Sexuality has always been for humans a form of communication, a way we express love and caring and bonding, not only a way we have children if we choose to.”

— Gloria Steinem

108. “The point is less what we choose than that we have the power to make a choice.”

— Gloria Steinem

109. “Religion is often politics made sacred.”

— Gloria Steinem

110. “It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.”

— Gloria Steinem

111. “There is no such thing as a perfect leader. We have to learn to lead ourselves.”

— Gloria Steinem

112. “If women could sleep their way to the top, there’d be a lot more women at the top.”

— Gloria Steinem

113. “Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.”

— Gloria Steinem

114. “Economic systems are not value-free columns of numbers based on rules of reason, but ways of expressing what varying societies believe is important.”

— Gloria Steinem

115. “As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I’ve always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other’s lives are our best textbooks.”

— Gloria Steinem

116. “Too much of our lives corresponds to the ‘lost-wallet’ theory of life. You lose something, spend a long time finding it, and then feel grateful to be back where you started.”

— Gloria Steinem

117. “You do have all five sense when you’re in a room together. You communicate and understand each other in a much deeper way. It is a different form of communication from writing or being on the web.”

— Gloria Steinem

118. “Progress is not automatic, it depends on what we do every day. So any statement of ownership of our own bodies, however that occurs in our individual lives or our community or our collective lives, is crucial.”

— Gloria Steinem

119. “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

120. “We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.”

— Gloria Steinem

121. “If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.”

— Gloria Steinem

122. “Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.”

— Gloria Steinem

123. “Feminism starts out being very simple, and it ends up being a world view that questions hierarchy altogether.”

— Gloria Steinem

124. “We’re changing ourselves to fit the world instead of changing the world to fit women.”

— Gloria Steinem

125. “How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group’s greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.”

— Gloria Steinem

126. “Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.”

— Gloria Steinem

127. “All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don’t want to be anyone’s mirror.”

— Gloria Steinem

128. “The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn’t exist in every culture.”

— Gloria Steinem

129. “I began to sense that a big part of our problem is simple ignorance of what the oldest cultures have to teach.”

— Gloria Steinem

130. “Self-esteem is the basis of any democracy.”

— Gloria Steinem

131. “One of the main problems of our time is that men are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called feminine, and women are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called masculine.”

— Gloria Steinem

132. “Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls – all those are reasons for women’s wildly unequal political power.”

— Gloria Steinem

133. “We have to stop arresting prostitutes and not arresting traffickers and pimps. It’s absurd. We’re arresting the victim or the survivor and not the oppressor.”

— Gloria Steinem

134. “I always trust the microcosm over the macrocosm.”

— Gloria Steinem

135. “Don’t worry about your background, whether it’s odd or ordinary, use it, build on it.”

— Gloria Steinem

136. “If you follow the voice inside you, it does give you guidance.”

— Gloria Steinem

137. “We learn most where we know the least.”

— Gloria Steinem

138. “It’s a big gift to be recognizable as part of something that matters to people, but that’s not the same as being responsible for something.”

— Gloria Steinem

139. “Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.”

— Gloria Steinem

140. “We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.”

— Gloria Steinem

141. “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That’s their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.”

— Gloria Steinem

142. “Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.”

— Gloria Steinem

143. “Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.”

— Gloria Steinem

144. “The voting booth is the only place that a pauper equals a billionaire, and any woman equals any man.”

— Gloria Steinem

145. “Where men come to and women come together most intimately in sexuality in the home has become suffused with violence.”

— Gloria Steinem

146. “Always ask the turtle.”

— Gloria Steinem

147. “Nature doesn’t move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.”

— Gloria Steinem

148. “Women’s total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.”

— Gloria Steinem

149. “I recommend trying this kind of grassroots organizing for a week or a year, a month or a lifetime – working for whatever change you want to see in the world. Then one day you will be talking to a stranger who has no idea you played any part in the victory she or he is celebrating.”

— Gloria Steinem

150. “Logic has nothing to do with oppression.”

— Gloria Steinem