Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Gloria Steinem

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

356. “Perhaps because women are seen as good listeners, I find that a traveling woman – perhaps especially a traveling feminist – becomes a kind of celestial bartender.”

— Gloria Steinem

357. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

368. “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

369. “Writing is always harder than talking.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

371. “The idea that women are ‘our own worst enemies’ forces us to admit that we don’t have the power to be, even if we wanted too.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

380. “MY LAST HOPE IS to open up the road – literally. So far it’s been overwhelmingly masculine turf. Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.”

— Gloria Steinem

381. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

383. “We will live to see the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.”

— Gloria Steinem

384. “Because adventure starts the moment I leave my door.”

— Gloria Steinem

385. “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

386. “I’ve yet to be on a campus where most women weren’t worrying about some aspect of combining marriage, children, and a career. I’ve yet to find one where many men were worrying about the same thing.”

— Gloria Steinem

387. “Our own lives feel so disordered and confusing, so it’s amazing to me that the filmmakers caught the personal, emotional high points and low points of my life and not just the public aspects.”

— Gloria Steinem

388. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

390. “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

391. “This is a crucial job of being an organizer. You leave a dark basement and try to explain to people in the sunshine what it’s like to live down there. I’ve learned this is best done by bringing these different groups of people together. Those with extra money discover how much more satisfying it is to see talent and fairness grow then to see objects accumulate. Those without money learn the valuable lesson that money doesn’t cure all woes. Instead, it may actually insulate and isolate.”

— Gloria Steinem

392. “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

393. “It’s time to leave. There is so much out there to do and say and listen to. I can go on the road, because I can come home. I come home, because I am free to leave.”

— Gloria Steinem

394. “Writers – we’re a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least, I do.”

— Gloria Steinem

395. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

397. “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

398. “And I was angry because the media took racism seriously – or pretended to – but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.”

— Gloria Steinem

399. “There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.”

— Gloria Steinem

400. “Like the spider spinning its web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. The universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed.”

— Gloria Steinem