Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The most impersonal seeming audiences eventually just say such intimate, smart, wise, amazing, totally surprising, funny things. It’s empowering, in the sense of feeling like you’re a part of something really important.”

— Gloria Steinem

252. “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

253. “That’s why, if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow for consciousness to change.”

— Gloria Steinem

254. “I hope readers will consider, especially in this age of the World Wide Web, that as miraculous as it is, we still need to be in the same room with all five senses if we are to empathize with each other.”

— Gloria Steinem

255. “Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.”

— Gloria Steinem

256. “You’re a unique person. You should do what you’re suited to do. We all should. It’s the only way to be happy. That pressure is all outside. It’s external.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

258. “Men may feel just disempowered by intimacy, by being close to a woman, and also by feeling the tender feelings that they’re ashamed of.”

— Gloria Steinem

259. “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

260. “I think of the future in two ways – survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.”

— Gloria Steinem

261. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

263. “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

264. “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

265. “Most women’s magazines simply try to mold women into bigger and better consumers.”

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

270. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

283. “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

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

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

— 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. “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

290. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

292. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

294. “Feminism is memory.”

— Gloria Steinem

295. “I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be “unfeminine”, so we suppress it-until it overflows.”

— Gloria Steinem

296. “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

297. “There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

299. “Our current plight is not made inevitable by human nature. What once was could be again – in a new way.”

— Gloria Steinem

300. “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