Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.”

— Gloria Steinem

252. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

255. “If you say, I’m for equal pay, that’s a reform. But if you say. I’m a feminist, that’s a transformation of society.”

— Gloria Steinem

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

259. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

261. “Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends.”

— Gloria Steinem

262. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

265. “Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn’t create the crime.”

— Gloria Steinem

266. “Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don’t.”

— Gloria Steinem

267. “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

268. “I was not considered beautiful before I was a feminist. I was a pretty girl before, but suddenly, after I was publicly identified as a feminist, I was beautiful. So, many people were really commenting on what they thought feminists looked like.”

— Gloria Steinem

269. “Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.”

— Gloria Steinem

270. “Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described – and will be, after our deaths – by each of the family members who believe they know us.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

272. “Like so many women, I was living out the unlived life of my mother, so I wouldn’t be her. But the price I paid was that I distanced myself internally. I wasn’t as close to her then as I nowadays, in retrospect, wish I had been.”

— Gloria Steinem

273. “Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

275. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

277. “According to the wisdom of Indian Country on my own continent, it takes four generations to heal one act of violence. What.”

— Gloria Steinem

278. “Our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.”

— Gloria Steinem

279. “Knowing About Victoria Woodhull inspires women to be daring, outrageous and creative.”

— Gloria Steinem

280. “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

281. “I’ve only ever met one woman who actually was a prostitute of her own free will. She didn’t have a pimp. She could pick and choose her customers. That’s so rare.”

— Gloria Steinem

282. “I never expected to be even busier at 81, and doing more of what I love, than when I was 30.”

— Gloria Steinem

283. “I would put all the efforts to humanize the “masculine” and “feminine” gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.”

— Gloria Steinem

284. “Feminism is memory.”

— Gloria Steinem

285. “No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.”

— Gloria Steinem

286. “The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education.”

— Gloria Steinem

287. “Voting isn’t the most we can do, but the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one.”

— Gloria Steinem

288. “I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.”

— Gloria Steinem

289. “Women, we tend to become whole people by venturing outside of the home, learning to aspire, to achieve, to deal with conflict – all these qualities that are wrongly called masculine.”

— Gloria Steinem

290. “Laughter is the only free emotion – the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third and when we suddenly see a new reality... laughter is an orgasm of the mind.”

— Gloria Steinem

291. “There’s more variation among human groups than between human groups.”

— Gloria Steinem

292. “Surrealism is the triumph of form over content.”

— Gloria Steinem

293. “I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.”

— Gloria Steinem

294. “I don’t want to die saying but, you know? There’s so much I want to do, so I want more time.”

— Gloria Steinem

295. “The Internet is an almost miraculous way of getting information, of finding and organizing with each other, both minutely and globally. A million times better than the phone and the mimeograph! Also much better than TV, which is one-way and passive.”

— Gloria Steinem

296. “But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take my sister and go to New York?” she would say it didn’t matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.” I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.”

— Gloria Steinem

297. “Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.”

— Gloria Steinem

298. “Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native myhtologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hieractchical pile and surivive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a break of boundaries who makes us laugh- and laughter lets the sacred it.”

— Gloria Steinem

299. “The definition of woman’s work is shitwork.”

— Gloria Steinem

300. “My father did not have to trade dying alone for the joys of the road. My mother did not have to give up a journey of her own to have a home. Neither do I. Neither do you.”

— Gloria Steinem