Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “They would say well there’s always been wars, men have always beaten women. But it isn’t true in all cultures. It doesn’t have to be true. And the first step is imaging.”

— Gloria Steinem

304. “Basically, I feel different from most other women. I feel I don’t have to put on an act. If I’m not feminine enough for someone, I don’t care, because femininity is different in everyone’s mind.”

— Gloria Steinem

305. “There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

307. “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

308. “I think we acquire habits of mind when we’re little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.”

— Gloria Steinem

309. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

311. “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

312. “What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

315. “Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste – and how women’s bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.”

— Gloria Steinem

316. “There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.”

— Gloria Steinem

317. “People start to talk about post-racist, post-feminist. What does that mean? We’re clearly not post either. Would you say post-democracy? Clearly we haven’t reached true democracy yet.”

— Gloria Steinem

318. “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

319. “Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.”

— Gloria Steinem

320. “I’m not sure that it’s up to me to sum up what I’ve done with it in the past. I’m not sure there’s a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.”

— Gloria Steinem

321. “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

322. “I sometimes wonder if I am crisscrossing my father’s ghostly paths and we are entering same towns or roadside diners or the black ribbons of highways that gleam in the night rain. As if we were images in a time-lapse photograph.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

324. “Frequently people just vote for the party out of power because they’re disappointed or angry at what is happening at the moment.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

326. “A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.”

— Gloria Steinem

327. “Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.”

— Gloria Steinem

328. “For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.”

— Gloria Steinem

329. “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

330. “The original languages didn’t even have he and she. They didn’t have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

332. “Then, as if in answer to a riddle posed years before, you will realize that this growth came from seeds you planted or watered or carried from place to place – and you’ll be rewarded in the way that we as communal beings need most: you’ll know you made a difference.”

— Gloria Steinem

333. “Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way. I mean if we want approval, we have to sing the blues, even as singers we sing the blues.”

— Gloria Steinem

334. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

336. “I don’t know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

338. “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

339. “Beware of any motto that glorifies the past. It’s code for restoring hierarchy. For example: “Make America great again.”

— Gloria Steinem

340. “Economics anxiety may be even more common than the often identified ‘math anxiety,’ for unlike math, which has its personal uses, economics is seen as a mysterious set of forces manipulated from above.”

— Gloria Steinem

341. “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities.”

— Gloria Steinem

342. “Sadomasochiasm – which we know very well doesn’t exist in societies that don’t have child abuse – is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.”

— Gloria Steinem

343. “I just think that culturally, women – we’re all human beings – but at least we don’t have our masculinity to prove.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

345. “All movements need a few people who can’t be fired.”

— Gloria Steinem

346. “The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.”

— Gloria Steinem

347. “We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.”

— Gloria Steinem

348. “In retrospect, perhaps the biggest reason my mother was cared for but not helped for twenty years was the simplest: Her functioning was not that necessary to the world.”

— Gloria Steinem

349. “Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.”

— Gloria Steinem

350. “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