Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Romance is a means to the end of self-completion, but love is an end in itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

202. “Hope is a very unruly emotion.”

— Gloria Steinem

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Liberation does not come from outside.”

— Gloria Steinem

209. “Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight.”

— Gloria Steinem

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

226. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

232. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

235. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

247. “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

248. “Women must have seats at the table because peace is too crucial to be left only to the politicians or only to the male half of our world.”

— Gloria Steinem

249. “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

250. “This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.”

— Gloria Steinem