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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

407. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

409. “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

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410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

416. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

419. “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

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. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

426. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

429. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

431. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

435. “Everyone has a home but me.”

— Gloria Steinem

436. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

440. “Most books are bought by women.”

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

442. “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

443. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Gloria Steinem

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

— Gloria Steinem

450. “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

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