Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

204. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

205. “The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they’ll know it’s possible.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

212. “A movement is only composed of people moving. To feel its warmth and motion around us is the end as well as the means.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

215. “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

216. “I think laughter is crucial. Some of the original cultures, like the Dalit and the Native American, don’t separate laughter and seriousness.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

218. “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

219. “People say, ‘Oh, you’ve sacrificed so much, now’s the time to do something for yourself.’ I mean, please – that is so wrong. I don’t think I’ve sacrificed one f-king thing.”

— Gloria Steinem

220. “There is no such thing as Superwoman. You cant have everything if you do everything.”

— Gloria Steinem

221. “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

222. “It turns out that we literally don’t empathize unless we’re physically present – that the oxytocin, the famous “tend and befriend” hormone is not produced unless we’re present with all five senses.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

224. “There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.”

— Gloria Steinem

225. “From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence – and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.”

— Gloria Steinem

226. “It’s never to late for a happy childhood.”

— Gloria Steinem

227. “Liberation does not come from outside.”

— Gloria Steinem

228. “We’re communal animals. If we’re by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.”

— Gloria Steinem

229. “Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.”

— Gloria Steinem

230. “It’s not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There’s opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.”

— Gloria Steinem

231. “A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.”

— Gloria Steinem

232. “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

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233. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

235. “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

236. “I do not like to write – I like to have written.”

— Gloria Steinem

237. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

239. “The purpose of ass-kicking is not that your ass gets kicked at the right time or for the right reason,” she often explained. “It’s to keep your ass sensitive.”

— Gloria Steinem

240. “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

241. “Elephants are so wise and so funny and so endangered and so intelligent. I just think there is a lot to learn from them.”

— Gloria Steinem

242. “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

Featured in: Country Quotes

243. “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

244. “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

245. “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

246. “We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.”

— Gloria Steinem

247. “I want us to organize, to tell the personal stories that create empathy, which is the most revolutionary emotion.”

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Gloria Steinem

249. “For a man to say, “I have to leave work now because I need to do something with my kids,” it’s sometimes viewed as a career killer. He doesn’t have the right drive. So when they depart from their gender roles, they face some of the same restrictions.”

— Gloria Steinem

250. “IF EVERYONE HAS A full circle of human qualities to complete, then progress lies in the direction we haven’t been.”

— Gloria Steinem