Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

253. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

256. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

263. “Feminism is memory.”

— Gloria Steinem

264. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “Pound for pound, she was stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

273. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

275. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.”

— Gloria Steinem

282. “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

283. “It would be a disaster to have Sarah Palin or Carly Fiorina in the White House, so it’s not just a woman, but a woman who stands for the majority needs of women. It’s not just getting a job for one woman, it’s making life better for all women.”

— Gloria Steinem

284. “Feminism isn’t called the longest revolution for nothing.”

— Gloria Steinem

285. “At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.”

— Gloria Steinem

286. “What we have been raised to think of as inevitable – division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states – actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

288. “We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.”

— Gloria Steinem

289. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

291. “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

292. “At first, feminists were assumed to be only discontented suburban housewives; then a small bunch of women’s “libbers”, bra burners, and radicals; then women on welfare; then briefcase carrying imitations of male executives; then unfulfilled women who forgot to have children; then women voters... that really could decide elections. That last was too dangerous, so suddenly we were told we were in a “postfeminist” age...”

— Gloria Steinem

293. “The ends and means are a seamless web.”

— Gloria Steinem

294. “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

295. “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

296. “Feminism... is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.”

— Gloria Steinem

297. “As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, “Hate generalizes, love specifies”. Thats what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

299. “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

300. “Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.”

— Gloria Steinem