Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

353. “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

354. “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

355. “A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

360. “Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.”

— Gloria Steinem

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

366. “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

367. “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

368. “Women have to learn how to talk as much as we listen. Men have to learn how to listen as much as they talk.”

— Gloria Steinem

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.”

— Gloria Steinem

373. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “Writing is always harder than talking.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

383. “I just think that culturally, women – we’re all human beings – but at least we don’t have our masculinity to prove.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

393. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

400. “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