Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “When men realize that feminism is a universal good that affects them in very intimate ways then I think they really become allies and leaders.”

— Gloria Steinem

103. “If you really want to be lonely, get married.”

— Gloria Steinem

104. “I can’t mate in captivity.”

— Gloria Steinem

105. “She didn’t put her finger to the wind; she became the wind.”

— Gloria Steinem

106. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

108. “When you say something in a wrong group – it will never be right, so you can not say anything wrong, when you don’t belong to a group.”

— Gloria Steinem

109. “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

110. “We’ll only really know we’ve succeeded when a mediocre woman does as well as a mediocre man. You shouldn’t have to be extraordinary. That’s the point!”

— Gloria Steinem

111. “Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.”

— Gloria Steinem

112. “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

113. “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

114. “Prostitution isn’t the oldest profession, it’s the oldest oppression.”

— Gloria Steinem

115. “Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn’t create the crime.”

— Gloria Steinem

116. “The old languages – at least the ones I know – don’t have gender. They don’t have gendered pronouns. There’s no “he” and “she.” A human being is a human being.”

— Gloria Steinem

117. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

119. “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

120. “Religion is often politics made sacred.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

123. “Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hierarchical pile and survive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a breaker of boundaries who makes us laugh – and laughter lets the sacred in. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.”

— Gloria Steinem

124. “Feminism... is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.”

— Gloria Steinem

125. “No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t.”

— Gloria Steinem

126. “She is a water bug on the surface of life.”

— Gloria Steinem

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

130. “A movement happens when people are inspired by somebody, but they do it themselves. You don’t wait for someone else. You do it yourself.”

— Gloria Steinem

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

134. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

137. “That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.”

— Gloria Steinem

138. “Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

140. “Voting isn’t the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.”

— Gloria Steinem

141. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

143. “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

144. “We have to imagine change before we can begin to move toward it.”

— Gloria Steinem

145. “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

146. “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

147. “Pound for pound, she was stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

— Gloria Steinem

148. “Feminism isn’t called the longest revolution for nothing.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem