Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

204. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

206. “Hope is a very unruly emotion.”

— Gloria Steinem

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

212. “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

213. “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

214. “Liberation does not come from outside.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

216. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

218. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

220. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

223. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

230. “Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.”

— Gloria Steinem

231. “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

232. “If you can learn to like how you look, and not the way you think you look, it can set you free.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

240. “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

241. “I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.”

— Gloria Steinem

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

245. “This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.”

— Gloria Steinem

246. “Women get hit with a double whammy. If they’re attractive, they’re presumed to have slept their way to the top. If they’re unattractive, they are presumed to have chosen a profession because they could not get a man.”

— Gloria Steinem

247. “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

248. “Women are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.”

— Gloria Steinem

249. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem