Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.”

— Gloria Steinem

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

308. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

311. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

313. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

324. “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

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. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

328. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

338. “Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn’t for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.”

— Gloria Steinem

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

344. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

349. “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

350. “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