Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2024 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. “The definition of woman’s work is shitwork.”

— Gloria Steinem

303. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

315. “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

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

— 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 ends and means are a seamless web.”

— Gloria Steinem

319. “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

320. “We do what we see and what we’re told. If we haven’t been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don’t have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it’s not only natural but inevitable.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

322. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

331. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “It’s said that the biggest determinant of our lives is whether we see the world as welcoming or hostile. Each becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Gloria Steinem

337. “The travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote that our nomadic past lives on in our “need for distraction, our mania for the new.”1 In many languages, even the word for human being is “one who goes on migrations.” Progress itself is a word rooted in a seasonal journey. Perhaps our need to escape into media is a misplaced desire for the journey.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

339. “I would say that reproductive freedom comes first, then violence and economics.”

— Gloria Steinem

340. “There are many more women who identify as unique people as well as mothers, or instead of as mothers, than there used to be and, hopefully, there are more men who identify as fathers.”

— Gloria Steinem

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

344. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

346. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

348. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

350. “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