Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “I would say that reproductive freedom comes first, then violence and economics.”

— Gloria Steinem

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

356. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

358. “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

359. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

360. “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

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

— 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. “God may be in the details, but the Goddess is in the connections.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

371. “Writing is always harder than talking.”

— Gloria Steinem

372. “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

373. “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

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. “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

376. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

378. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

380. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— 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. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

398. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

400. “Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.”

— Gloria Steinem