Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Close your eyes and pretend you are living with a woman – how would you divide the housework?”

— Gloria Steinem

402. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

404. “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

405. “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

406. “The political is personal.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

408. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

410. “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

411. “When someone asks me if I believe in God and I say no – I believe in people – I.”

— Gloria Steinem

412. “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

413. “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

414. “Most books are bought by women.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

416. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

424. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

436. “Everyone has a home but me.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

439. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem