Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

412. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

415. “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

416. “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman – how would you divide the housework?”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes

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

— Gloria Steinem

419. “It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.”

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Country Quotes

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

423. “If you look at the public opinion polls even, support for all the issues, people who self-identify as feminists are as least as many as those who self-identify as Republicans.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

432. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

434. “If time is relative, doing new things actually makes us feel we’ve lived a longer life.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

436. “Everyone has a home but me.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

439. “It’s endlessly interesting to be organizing and hearing possible solutions or thinking of possible solutions and how to put efforts together. It makes everything else boring, actually.”

— Gloria Steinem

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “Most books are bought by women.”

— Gloria Steinem

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— Gloria Steinem

445. “It’s especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you’re so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

449. “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

450. “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