Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

403. “Everyone has a home but me.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

406. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

408. “Most books are bought by women.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

410. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

412. “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

413. “A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.”

— Gloria Steinem

414. “The media are not reality; reality is reality.”

— Gloria Steinem

415. “Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know – that’s just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn’t perfect yet. We don’t all have that. But we’re trying.”

— Gloria Steinem

416. “American travel seems to need an advocate.”

— Gloria Steinem

417. “I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.”

— Gloria Steinem

418. “I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.”

— Gloria Steinem

419. “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

420. “Language can’t solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.”

— Gloria Steinem

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

424. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

426. “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

427. “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

428. “Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger – and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women.”

— Gloria Steinem

429. “Will we get to the point that learning sign language is a part of literacy? That knowing both an audible and a physical language is routine?”

— Gloria Steinem

430. “Suddenly, it seems ridiculous that we just came from a city airport named for Columbus, a terrible navigator who insisted to his dying day that he was in India – which is why people here are called Indians. As the Native women in Houston said, “It could have been worse – he could have thought he was in Turkey.”

— Gloria Steinem

431. “It also reminds me of an organizing principle: Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.”

— Gloria Steinem

432. “The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen’s skin.”

— Gloria Steinem

433. “No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you’re working your ass off, then you don’t want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you.”

— Gloria Steinem

434. “It’s the biggest economic influence in a woman’s life whether she can decide when and whether to have children or not.”

— Gloria Steinem

435. “It’s hard to measure success when we’re dealing with between 500 and 5,000 years of patriarchy depending on which continent we sit, so I would say feminism has been successful and we have a huge distance to go, huge.”

— Gloria Steinem

436. “Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.”

— Gloria Steinem

437. “What would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?”

— Gloria Steinem

438. “Worry less about solutions from the top or the idea that there is a solution, but try to do whatever you can and instill in each action the values that you want to result.”

— Gloria Steinem

439. “A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.”

— Gloria Steinem

440. “For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn’t yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.”

— Gloria Steinem

441. “If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.”

— Gloria Steinem

442. “We all have good instincts unless they’re beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood.”

— Gloria Steinem

443. “When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was, and that my real parents were going to come get me. I was just too different from the rest of the family, so I lived in books and in my imagination.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

445. “It’s obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women’s movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.”

— Gloria Steinem

446. “I’d like to be played as a child by Natalie Wood. I’d have some romantic scenes as Audrey Hepburn and have gritty black-and-white scenes as Patricia Neal.”

— Gloria Steinem

447. “Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

448. “When the past dies, we mourn for the dead. When the future dies, we mourn for ourselves.”

— Gloria Steinem

449. “Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself.”

— Gloria Steinem

450. “If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.”

— Gloria Steinem