Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “And I was angry because the media took racism seriously – or pretended to – but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

353. “Writing is always harder than talking.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

355. “In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

357. “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

358. “I know that lack of contact creates more lack of contact, and contact creates more contact, or at least an ability to talk to with each other.”

— Gloria Steinem

359. “We choose to be writers because we don’t want to talk.”

— Gloria Steinem

360. “Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn’t create the crime.”

— Gloria Steinem

361. “If you look at the public opinion polls even, support for all the issues, people who self-identify as feminists are as least as many as those who self-identify as Republicans.”

— Gloria Steinem

362. “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

363. “Nothing can replace being in the same space. That’s exactly why we need to keep creating the temporary worlds of meetings, small and large, on campuses and everywhere else.”

— Gloria Steinem

364. “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

365. “Altogether, if I’d been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

367. “A portable friend to all readers-especia lly but not only women-who need to learn that the Golden Rule works only if it’s reversible: We must learn to treat ourselves as well as we wish to treat others.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

370. “You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing that a woman has been killed by a man for clearly gender-related reasons.”

— Gloria Steinem

371. “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman – how would you divide the housework?”

— Gloria Steinem

372. “The only thing I can’t stand is discomfort.”

— Gloria Steinem

373. “So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?”

— Gloria Steinem

374. “Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women’s movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.”

— Gloria Steinem

375. “Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189.”

— Gloria Steinem

376. “Don’t write when you’re angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don’t.”

— Gloria Steinem

377. “I still don’t see reports in newspapers about white supremacists who are trying to establish an armed and separatist homeland in the rural Northwest and parts of Canada, yet.”

— Gloria Steinem

378. “I always say to audiences of men: “Cooperation beats submission. Trust me.””

— Gloria Steinem

379. “The road itself is informative, because it forces you to respond spontaneously and to encounter the unexpected. It forces you to reassess what you felt about people or issues or places, and it forces you to live in the present.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

381. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

382. “People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it’s just too much.”

— Gloria Steinem

383. “The young women seem to think that they can only go out with or marry a man who is superior to them. The problem there is that they are wanting to be defeated, as opposed to finding a partner.”

— Gloria Steinem

384. “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

385. “Proust’s tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.”

— Gloria Steinem

386. “When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no – I believe in people – I.”

— Gloria Steinem

387. “When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.”

— Gloria Steinem

388. “Everyone has a home but me.”

— Gloria Steinem

389. “Some women and men seem to need each other.”

— Gloria Steinem

390. “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

391. “Men tend to gain wholeness by acquiring the qualities that are wrongly called feminine.”

— Gloria Steinem

392. “The problem for all women is we’re identified by how we look, instead of by our heads and hearts.”

— Gloria Steinem

393. “I haven’t been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you’re more likely to be treated as an individual.”

— Gloria Steinem

394. “It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.”

— Gloria Steinem

395. “Self-esteem starts out as a personal blessing, but it becomes nothing less than an evolutionary force.”

— Gloria Steinem

396. “You didn’t leave your party. Your party left you. Forget about party labels. Just vote on the issues and for candidates who support equality.”

— Gloria Steinem

397. “Most books are bought by women.”

— Gloria Steinem

398. “Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.”

— Gloria Steinem

399. “I was the only “girl writer,” probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, “Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem