Quote collection
211 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"For any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited."
"I think when tragedy occurs, it presents a choice. You can give in to the void, the emptiness that fills your heart, your lungs, constricts your ability to think or even breathe. Or you can try to find meaning. These past thirty days, I have spent many of my moments lost in that void. And I know that many future moments will be consumed by the vast emptiness as well. But when I can, I want to choose life and meaning."
"The traditional metaphor for careers is a ladder, but I no longer think that metaphor holds. It just doesn’t make sense in a less hierarchical world... Build your skills, not your resume. Evaluate what you can do, not the title they’re going to give you. Do real work. Take a sales quota, a line role, an ops job. Don’t plan too much, and don’t expect a direct climb. If I had mapped out my career when I was sitting where you are, I would have missed my career."
"I want women to get paid more. I want to teach them to negotiate so they get paid more."
"The most important thing - and I've said it a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred times - if you marry a man, marry the right one."
"Don't be afraid to ask the 'dumb' question, everyone else will be relieved you had the guts to ask!"
"The promise of equality is not the same as true equality."
"There is no straight path from your seat today to where you are going. Don't try to draw that line. You will not just get it wrong, you'll miss big opportunities. And I mean big-like the Internet. Careers are not ladders, those days are long gone, but jungle gyms. Don't just move up and down, don't just look up, look backwards, sideways around corners. Your career and your life will have starts and stops and zigs and zags. Don't stress out about the white space-the path you can't draw- because there in lies both the surprises and the opportunities."
"I'd like to see where boys and girls end up if they get equal encouragement I think we might have some differences in how leadership is done"
"We have to ask ourselves if we have become so focused on supporting personal choices that we're failing to encourage women to aspire to leadership."
"My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can."
"Over the last 10 years, women have stalled out at the top."
"Excel and you will get a mentor."
"If I had to embrace a definition of success, it would be that success is making the best choices we can ... and accepting them."
"We've got to get women to sit at the table."
"When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her."
"Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, thirteen per cent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top - C-level jobs, board seats - tops out at fifteen, sixteen per cent."
"Coming from Google, you don't exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft."
"...parents who work outside the home are still capable of giving their children a loving and secure childhood. Some data even suggest that having two parents working outside the home can be advantageous to a child's development, particularly for girls."
"All of us want the same things. We want to be good to the people around us and for our lives to have meaning. For me that means making the world a little bit easier for women."