Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

154. “A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.”

— Gloria Steinem

155. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

159. “As with all inferior things, this part of the city was given an adjective while the rest stole the noun.”

— Gloria Steinem

160. “When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel... Taking to the road – by which I mean letting the road take you – changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories – in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”

— Gloria Steinem

161. “After all, hope is a form of planning.”

— Gloria Steinem

162. “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

163. “Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one.”

— Gloria Steinem

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

167. “Each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

170. “Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.”

— Gloria Steinem

171. “Always ask the turtle.”

— Gloria Steinem

172. “Women have always been an equal part of the past. We just havent been a part of history.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

175. “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

176. “Women are not going to be equal outside the home until men are equal in it.”

— Gloria Steinem

177. “Evil is obvious only in retrospect.”

— Gloria Steinem

178. “This is what forty looks like. We’ve been lying so long, who would know?”

— Gloria Steinem

179. “Women are always saying,“We can do anything that men cando.” But Men should be saying,“We can do anything that women can do.”

— Gloria Steinem

180. “The purpose of feminism is to free the uniqueness of the individual and to understand that inside each of us is a unique human being who is a combination of heredity and environment.”

— Gloria Steinem

181. “A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.”

— Gloria Steinem

182. “A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.”

— Gloria Steinem

183. “The deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home.”

— Gloria Steinem

184. “America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.”

— Gloria Steinem

185. “More and more men are raising children or want to be close to their kids. They don’t want to just lead work-obsessed lives and end up 50 years later with an engraved watch.”

— Gloria Steinem

186. “Violence against women is clearly not solved, not at all solved, and the reasons for it, which are controlling women’s bodies in order to control reproduction, are definitely not solved.”

— Gloria Steinem

187. “Superwoman is the adversary of the women’s movement.”

— Gloria Steinem

188. “Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.”

— Gloria Steinem

189. “I think I’ve wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people’s lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.”

— Gloria Steinem

190. “I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.”

— Gloria Steinem

191. “Most women are one man away from welfare.”

— Gloria Steinem

192. “If someone called me a lesbian – in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians – I learned just to say, “Thank you.” It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.”

— Gloria Steinem

193. “No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.”

— Gloria Steinem

194. “I was angry about the human talent that was lost just because it was born into a female body, and the mediocrity that was rewarded because it was born into a male one. And.”

— Gloria Steinem

195. “Men should think twice before making widow hood woman’s only path to power.”

— Gloria Steinem

196. “More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.”

— Gloria Steinem

197. “We need to take violence against women seriously. It is the biggest indicator of whether a country is violent inside itself, and whether it will be militarily violent against another country.”

— Gloria Steinem

198. “No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”

— Gloria Steinem

199. “Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.”

— Gloria Steinem

200. “When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.”

— Gloria Steinem