Top 40 Sarah Wynn-Williams Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “The truth here is inescapable. Myanmar would’ve been far better off if Facebook had never arrived there.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

2. “The sheer scale of the contemplated power grab silences us all. He’d control how the news is made, as well as the algorithm that targets and distributes it. What stays up and what doesn’t. Who is on the platform and who isn’t. Which would certainly come in handy if he runs for president.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

3. “If you want someone to actually influence the policy and political decisions that are ultimately made by Joel and Elliot, they’ll have a greater chance of success if they’re male, older, white, and a Harvard graduate. Facebook’s leaders want someone just like them. The ultimate trump card is if they’re friends with Joel, Elliot, Marne, Sheryl, or especially Mark.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

4. “While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies,” the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee told Yahoo.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

5. “In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people’s privacy. Which is good for Facebook’s business.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

6. “Sit at the table: Sheryl admits to feeling “imposter syndrome” but encourages women to “fake it till you make it.” She says that women keep themselves from advancing because they don’t have the self-confidence and drive that men do. “We lower our.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

7. “In other words, the WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

8. “On some level my life was going “Americanly.” I was living “the American dream,” bootstrapping from nothing to private jets with tech titans. Although the reality of that dream was darker than I expected.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

9. “In America, they put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

10. “Mark broods for much of the flight. When he suggests a board game, I agree to play explicitly on the condition that I don’t have to let him win. He thinks I’m joking. When I trounce him at Ticket to Ride, he accuses me of cheating.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

11. “Dying in childbirth while working in Silicon Valley is like being killed by a horse and carriage or consumption or a duel. Something that belongs in a different century or a different country.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

12. “But what I’m seeing is that the more comfortable he gets, the less he cares. As his importance compounds, his regard diminishes.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

13. “In fact, just the opposite. Turn after turn they encouraged it. In China, they specifically built the software to order. In America, they put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election. And in Myanmar, they enabled posts that led to horrific sexual violence and genocide. A lethal carelessness. That’s what this company is, and I was part of it.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

14. “My childhood was pretty normal, I guess, except for the time I was attacked by a shark.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

15. “The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

16. “China is, in Mark’s eyes, just the end of a to-do list, the last major project to tackle. Like he’s playing a game of Risk and he needs to occupy every territory.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

17. “You’re compromising with a dying industry rather than dominating it. Crushing it.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

18. “Better just to take a chance on what you have. If some drown, no need to dwell, safe in the knowledge that something better is just around the corner. That cheerful recklessness combined with passivity, that forward motion without introspection, that’s what Javi’s team has.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

19. “I know something’s up, when things don’t move fast.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

20. “When Mark does finally arrive, we’re marched upstairs to the president’s office. No one acknowledges our lateness, but it is clearly understood and extremely uncomfortable.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

21. “The expectation at Facebook is that mothering is invisible, and the more skilled you are, the more invisible it is.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

22. “Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

23. “We live in the same neighborhood in San Francisco and commute to and from the office together. Weirdly, Mark has his San Francisco house not too far from ours. When I ask him why we never see him in the neighborhood, he explains it’s because he can’t get planning permission for a place to park his helicopter so he rarely uses the house. We might live in similar places, but we are living completely different lives.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

24. “And it wasn’t just Joel. None of the senior leaders – Elliot or Sheryl or Mark – thought about this enough to put in place the kinds of systems we’d need, in Myanmar or other countries. They apparently didn’t care. These were sins of omission. It wasn’t the things they did; it was the things they didn’t do.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

25. “If Mark is asked if he’s abetting crimes against humanity, he’s basically supposed to say, “That hurts my feelings.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

26. “Everyone’s really into it despite the blatant nerdiness of it all, building their little empires and strategically negotiating. But as the night wears on, it becomes more and more obvious that people are letting Mark win.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

27. “One thing you learn as a diplomat, or maybe just as an adult: there are times to keep your thoughts and feelings to yourself.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

28. “We’re about to travel to the one country in the world where there’s an open arrest warrant for Mark Zuckerberg. And Mark thinks this is the time to show us his fake gangsta handshakes.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

29. “Of course we’re late to meet President Rousseff, but she’s gracious about it. Treats it like no big deal. This is a woman who’d been tortured by a military dictatorship, she’d been a guerrilla leader, so I frankly didn’t expect her to be the kind of person who’d engage in a lot of chitchat.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

30. “When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

31. “Mark opens the meeting by talking admiringly about what he calls “street fighter tactics” that Uber is employing against politicians around the world and how successful they’ve been.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

32. “You could tell Facebook “don’t take my contacts” but then when you opened Messenger, they’d take them by default. And his team is instrumental in the development of the “People You May Know” tool, which is described by Mashable as Facebook’s “creepy as hell tool” for its ability to make uncomfortable friend recommendations, such as when a sperm donor was recommended a biological child he had never met. It’s a growth-at-all-costs approach.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

33. “The ultimate type A personalities at Davos understand these minute power calibrations and spend their time comparing each and every one, constantly striving for more. So you overhear people saying sniffily that they’re surprised that a certain prime minister is staying in the Hilton Garden Inn rather than the Seehof Hotel, or that a celebrity mistakenly tried to cut in line for a panel, too uneducated to realize they were pushing past a Nobel laureate. The narcissism of small differences.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

34. “They don’t discuss the real secret behind maintaining their work-life balance, mothering as if they don’t have children: it’s undergirded by their multimillion-dollar paychecks.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

35. “Facebook is operating illegally in China. One of America’s biggest publicly listed companies is completely indifferent to the rules.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

36. “Vaughan operates in a different way from me and most of the policy team. He decides to crack the China market with his golf clubs, sending updates about whom he has golfed with and how this might lead to opportunities to meet with key government officials. The actual work, preparing briefings, tracking regulations, or analysing political developments, he delegates to interns, or the women who work for him.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

37. “What is a very short video feels like it grinds on for eternity. Mark awkwardly looks at the crowd. They stare back at him. I wonder, just for a moment, if Big Bird is behind this.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

38. “You weren’t responsive enough,” he says. “In my defense, I was in a coma for some of it.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

39. “So is this what it looks like when a company conspires with a government to avoid paying taxes? I know Kenny’s just trying to do right by his people and keep a bunch of jobs in Ireland. But still. It doesn’t feel right, this backroom deal.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

40. “And I haven’t learned the difference between knowing when to quit and knowing when to persevere.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

41. “They’ll claim we rolled back US intelligence actions that were privacy protected, and didn’t result in human rights abuses, but now we are willing to hand data to the Chinese government if we can profit off it.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

42. “One of Sheryl’s former Treasury colleagues tells her, “You all are two years away from being as hated as the investment banks.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

43. “To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

44. “It’s a weird thing to realize that the tech world, this most modern of industries, has cannon fodder.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

45. “Trump heavily outspent Clinton on Facebook ads. In the weeks before the election, the Trump campaign was regularly one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally. His campaign could afford to do this because the data targeting enabled it to raise millions each month in campaign contributions through Facebook. In fact, Facebook was the Trump campaign’s largest source of cash.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

46. “Effort, productivity, and the sacrifice of everything else in life are valorized and fetishized.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

47. “Look, this is my fault, I should have stayed with you,” I say. Knowing that I had, somewhat shamefully, left them alone by the stage to avoid Big Bird.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams

48. “Mark’s expecting his first child, and he tells us he might not be present for the birth. As the only person who’s birthed a baby, I’m stunned. And genuinely curious. “What would you be doing instead?” I asked him. Like, what in the world could possibly be more meaningful to him than the birth of his first child? He had no idea. Just “something more important might come up.”

— Sarah Wynn-Williams