Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

374. “Writing is always harder than talking.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Sadomasochiasm – which we know very well doesn’t exist in societies that don’t have child abuse – is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

388. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

390. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

394. “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

395. “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

396. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem