Top 70 Geena Davis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.”

— Geena Davis

2. “The main thing about archery is a battle with yourself. You can ruin it all. Once you have learned the technique, the point is to recreate the perfect technique over and over and over.”

— Geena Davis

3. “Archery is something that I took up later and didn’t know I had a natural aptitude for.”

— Geena Davis

4. “I almost never get nervous. I have ice water in my veins.”

— Geena Davis

5. “The most common occupation for women in G rated films is royalty – which is a great gig, if you can get it.”

— Geena Davis

6. “Are you stupid or did you just take lessons?”

— Geena Davis

7. “Something’s like crossed over in me and I can’t go back. I couldn’t live.”

— Geena Davis

8. “I had very, very bad self-esteem – that I was a fake, everybody was going to find out, that I didn’t deserve to have success, just about my looks and really, really bad self esteem.”

— Geena Davis

9. “The most important thing is to change what children see from the beginning. To not create a problem we have to fix later.”

— Geena Davis

10. “Archers are pretty focused.”

— Geena Davis

11. “I haven’t ever gone to any Mensa meetings.”

— Geena Davis

12. “I’m so not a party person. I’m so not social and don’t go to parties.”

— Geena Davis

13. “All of Hollywood is run on one assumption: That women will watch stories about men, but men won’t watch stories about women. It is a horrible indictment of our society of we assume that one half of our population is just not interested in the other half.”

— Geena Davis

14. “We have it in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we’ve done right by them. It’s the same in every profession. We get a handful of women professors, a few female board members – that looks normal.”

— Geena Davis

15. “Ridiculously – fortunately – my first job was with Dustin Hoffman. I had a little part in this movie called Tootsie. And he taught me how to watch dailies. That it was very important.”

— Geena Davis

16. “I have a Web site that parents and girls can use to learn about Title IX and take action if they find their school is not in compliance. Thirty years after Title IX passed, 80 percent of schools are not in compliance.”

— Geena Davis

17. “The ratio of male to female characters in movies has been exactly the same since 1946. So if you’ve ever had people say, you know, “It’s better now, it’s all changed, it’s all different,” it’s not, it hasn’t. Not yet.”

— Geena Davis

18. “I used to be very unathletic. I was always so gangly and self-conscious about my height. I had convinced myself I was uncoordinated. And as a result, I didn’t want to try stuff.”

— Geena Davis

19. “I once read a quote that I think was Michelle Pfeiffer in an article, who said that she thought people went into acting because maybe if you could convince millions of people to like you, you will finally like yourself, approve of yourself. I don’t know if that may have been a part of it.”

— Geena Davis

20. “It’s partly because our culture so hyper-sexualizes females that if you don’t measure up to whatever we’re forced to think is the standard, then you feel inadequate.”

— Geena Davis

21. “I think I always had joie de vivre. But I had pretty bad self-esteem growing up and much of my adult life.”

— Geena Davis

22. “It’s really important for boys to see that girls take up half of the planet – which we do.”

— Geena Davis

23. “The more hours of television a girl watches, the fewer options she thinks she has in life.”

— Geena Davis

24. “I had a deliberate plan to get into movies by becoming a model, so I went to New York and got a job pretending to be a mannequin in store windows.”

— Geena Davis

25. “I have an elbow that bends the wrong way, and I’d do things like stand in an elevator and the doors would close, and I’d pretend that my arm had got caught in it, and then I’d scream, ‘Ow, ow, put it back!’”

— Geena Davis

26. “I watched a lot of series. I didn’t watch a lot of movies on TV. But I watched Gilligan’s Island and Star Trek and all that stuff.”

— Geena Davis

27. “My thing in high school was being the tallest kid in class. Always. I was always the tallest kid in class.”

— Geena Davis

28. “I was tall from minute one. Always the tallest kid by a large margin. And my fantasy was to take up less space in the world.”

— Geena Davis

29. “I remember very distinctly being so tall I didn’t fit sleeves, so I ended up modeling lingerie and bathing suits, sleeveless stuff, basically. I didn’t have a good body, but I believed I knew how to stand or pose to mask it.”

— Geena Davis

30. “The only movies I saw till I was 17 were made by Disney. My parents had this thing. Disney was like, you know, “Ford is a good car. Disney makes good movies that are good for kids and safe.””

— Geena Davis

31. “Kids need to see entertainment where females are valued as much as males.”

— Geena Davis

32. “It’s a horrible and wonderful battle with yourself, to stay calm, stay in the moment. My coach said, “Stay here, not at the target. Don’t be down there.” It’s why they call it the Zen art.”

— Geena Davis

33. “I do have a very chill – I can watch all my movies. A lot of people don’t like to watch their work. I watch everything. All the time.”

— Geena Davis

34. “This dapper little mouse that wore such cute clothes and said such interesting things, yeah. I thought it was a great idea to have a mouse like that in your family, so now I get to see what it was like.”

— Geena Davis

35. “All I wanted, to be petite and attractive. I was afraid I’d never stop growing.”

— Geena Davis

36. “I don’t think male characters are as one-dimensional as female characters.”

— Geena Davis

37. “I don’t know how in the twenty-first century we can possibly justify not showing girls things that they can aspire to, and at the same time, how can we possibly be showing boys this narrow vision of what women are and what they can be.”

— Geena Davis

38. “A woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won’t talk to you.”

— Geena Davis

39. “They called and said, “I know we’re not supposed to even tell you, but you’ve been offered to play the President.” And I said, “OK. Say yes.” And they were like, “Do you want to read it maybe?” And I was like, “No, I just want to be the president.””

— Geena Davis

40. “If it isn’t a success, that still wouldn’t be grounds for divorce.”

— Geena Davis

41. “Somebody warned me early on to be very careful about brushing up against the chocolate...”

— Geena Davis

42. “I just love all the details about movies, and it’s fun to be involved in everything. I just love it. It’s just a little added fun thing to be consulted about stuff.”

— Geena Davis

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43. “I just passed on some a script that I was sent, because I said, “I haven’t yet played the person staying home, the one that says, ‘Good luck, honey,’ or whatever.” And so that’s what I look for. Therefore, by virtue of that exclusion, I’m always trying to find roles that are challenging.”

— Geena Davis

44. “I had told my agents that I never wanted to do an hour-long TV show. I said, “I’m not that stupid.” Because it’s the worst lifestyle in Hollywood.”

— Geena Davis

45. “I always want a challenge. My whole career has been based on trying to avoid female characters that don’t get to do anything. And it’s really hard to avoid those.”

— Geena Davis

46. “On film, you can’t do it over again. And you do have to stop shooting at a certain point.”

— Geena Davis

47. “I got cast playing the best baseball player anybody’s ever seen. I don’t know how to play any sport, including baseball, but I trained really hard. They had these great coaches, and they started saying, “Wow, you have some like really untapped athletic ability.””

— Geena Davis

48. “I’m not somebody who takes stuff home with them, that if I shoot a scene and I’m personally impacted for days or something. I mean it certainly is affecting and everything, but it doesn’t penetrate to some deeper layer. I’m in it when I’m in it.”

— Geena Davis

49. “Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we’re portrayed in popular culture.”

— Geena Davis

50. “When it came time for college, I told my parents I was going to major in acting. And they were so removed from anything to do with show business – my dad built our house and my mom grew our food.”

— Geena Davis