Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “She is a water bug on the surface of life.”

— Gloria Steinem

202. “Women fear endangering men’s approval so much, we don’t even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.”

— Gloria Steinem

203. “Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.”

— Gloria Steinem

204. “The whole idea is not to figure out what you should do that will matter, but to make each thing you do reflect the values you want, because we don’t know what’s going to matter in the future.”

— Gloria Steinem

205. “I would say don’t worry about what you should do, do whatever you can. And seek companions with shared values.”

— Gloria Steinem

206. “Little girls do not wake up in the morning and say “I dream of being a prostitute.” It is a terrible, terrible life. Body invasion is more traumatic than even getting beaten up. In certain circumstances, obviously, it may be a way to survive.”

— Gloria Steinem

207. “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

208. “The problem is, for men and women, the idea that sexuality is about dominance and submission, when, in fact, cooperation is a lot more fun, to put it my way. So some of it, a lot of it, is just about empathy.”

— Gloria Steinem

209. “Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

210. “Homemakers work longer and harder than any other class of worker in the United States for less pay, and are the most likely to be replaced by a younger worker.”

— Gloria Steinem

211. “Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.”

— Gloria Steinem

212. “I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don’t know what might be possible.”

— Gloria Steinem

213. “I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said ‘maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.’ It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.”

— Gloria Steinem

214. “I hope readers will consider, especially in this age of the World Wide Web, that as miraculous as it is, we still need to be in the same room with all five senses if we are to empathize with each other.”

— Gloria Steinem

215. “Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.”

— Gloria Steinem

216. “There is no such thing as a crime of passion, only a crime of possession.”

— Gloria Steinem

217. “I think of the future in two ways – survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.”

— Gloria Steinem

218. “When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.”

— Gloria Steinem

219. “Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they’re ashamed of.”

— Gloria Steinem

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “You’re a unique person. You should do what you’re suited to do. We all should. It’s the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It’s external.”

— Gloria Steinem

224. “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

225. “I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word “consent.” It used the word “welcome.””

— Gloria Steinem

226. “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

227. “I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.”

— Gloria Steinem

228. “I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had “crazy mothers.” We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.”

— Gloria Steinem

229. “Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.”

— Gloria Steinem

230. “I believe a unique core self is born into every human being; the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.”

— Gloria Steinem

231. “I always thought that “humanist” was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

233. “Democracy is just something you must do every day, like brushing you teeth.”

— Gloria Steinem

234. “Most art in the world does not have a capital ‘A,’ but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions.”

— Gloria Steinem

235. “The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It’s empowering, in the sense of feeling like you’re a part of something really important.”

— Gloria Steinem

236. “Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.”

— Gloria Steinem

237. “A man can be called ruthless if he bombs a country to oblivion. A woman can be called ruthless if she puts you on hold.”

— Gloria Steinem

238. “You have no choice but to live in the present, if you’re really being open to events and people as they come along.”

— Gloria Steinem

239. “We feel very celebratory and positive that we have created a voyage across the DMZ in peace and reconciliation that was said to be impossible.”

— Gloria Steinem

240. “Reading in the car was so much my personal journey that when my mother urged me to put down my book and look out the window, I would protest, “But I just looked an hour ago!”

— Gloria Steinem

241. “Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.”

— Gloria Steinem

242. “Looking at traditional marriages, it seems the surest way for a woman to be alone is to get married.”

— Gloria Steinem

243. “Democracy is mob rule with income taxes.”

— Gloria Steinem

244. “Writers are notorious for using any reason to keep from working: over-researching, retyping, going to meetings, waxing the floors – anything.”

— Gloria Steinem

245. “This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.”

— Gloria Steinem

246. “My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.”

— Gloria Steinem

247. “Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.”

— Gloria Steinem

248. “It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.”

— Gloria Steinem

249. “I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.”

— Gloria Steinem

250. “If you’re going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.”

— Gloria Steinem