Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

255. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

267. “God may be in the details, but the Goddess is in the connections.”

— Gloria Steinem

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

271. “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

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

— 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 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

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

— Gloria Steinem

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “I wouldn’t want to generalize, but we still do live in a society that’s sexist and racist and addicted to class and has the ridiculous idea that if you have money you’re smarter, which Donald Trump by himself should be able to disprove.”

— Gloria Steinem

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

293. “When gender comes down upon us, male or female, it comes as a restriction.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

295. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

297. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

300. “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