Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Gloria Steinem

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

307. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

310. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

319. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

338. “Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.”

— Gloria Steinem

339. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

342. “You can travel without traveling, and you can not travel – yet travel. Being on the road is a state of mind.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

349. “Power is being redefined. Women often explain with care that we mean power to control our lives, but not to dominate others.”

— Gloria Steinem

350. “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