Top 500 Gloria Steinem Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

403. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

405. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.”

— Gloria Steinem

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

426. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

428. “Roots can exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots. Religion may be a flower, but people are its roots.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

430. “I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.”

— Gloria Steinem

431. “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

432. “Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

434. “Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn’t have to talk – and I had been both.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

436. “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

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “In pre-Watergate, pre-sexual revolution times, such stories just weren’t written.”

— Gloria Steinem

444. “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

445. “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

446. “In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed.”

— Gloria Steinem

447. “Even migrating birds know that nature doesn’t demand a choice between nesting and flight.”

— Gloria Steinem

448. “It was the first time I witnessed the ancient and modern magic of groups in which anyone may speak in turn, everyone must listen, and consensus is more important than time.”

— Gloria Steinem

449. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem