Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.”

— Gloria Steinem

302. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

304. “Perhaps the most revolutionary act for a woman will be a self-willed journey – and to be welcomed when she comes home.”

— Gloria Steinem

305. “Feminism is memory.”

— Gloria Steinem

306. “We must not only vote but fight to vote. The voting booth really is the one place on earth where the least powerful equal the powerful. p176.”

— Gloria Steinem

307. “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

308. “In order to make a choice, you need the power to see there is one.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

310. “What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?”

— Gloria Steinem

311. “Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

313. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

315. “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

316. “If men started taking care of children, the job will become more valuable.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

319. “Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it’s not worth doing, or if they’re not superior to women in one way or another, they’re not really masculine.”

— Gloria Steinem

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “Unless we include a job as part of every citizen’s right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else’s idea of what need is.”

— Gloria Steinem

326. “Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman – perhaps especially a traveling feminist – becomes a kind of celestial bartender.”

— Gloria Steinem

327. “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

328. “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

329. “You’re afraid to be close to women. Because it’s not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child.”

— Gloria Steinem

330. “It’s not that women are less corruptible than men are, it’s that women have had less chance to become corrupt.”

— Gloria Steinem

331. “I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us- which is both the good and the bad news.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

333. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

335. “I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.”

— Gloria Steinem

336. “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

337. “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

338. “Inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.”

— Gloria Steinem

339. “Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.”

— Gloria Steinem

340. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

341. “How can I combine career and family?”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

343. “Of course, we can change. We’re very adaptable. But it takes a while.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

345. “Karla Jay’s intimate account of life in the early years of feminism and gay liberation is as irresistible as a novel, but as credible, humorous, and unexpected as real life.”

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Real Quotes

346. “Men can be just as loving and nurturing as women – it’s a libel on men to say they can’t – but we all learn by example. Boys just need nurturing men in their lives so they know it’s okay for them to be nurturing.”

— Gloria Steinem

347. “As I was to learn, avoiding conflict causes conflict to seek you out.”

— Gloria Steinem

348. “If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.”

— Gloria Steinem

349. “The idea that women are ‘our own worst enemies’ forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted too.”

— Gloria Steinem

350. “Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.”

— Gloria Steinem