Top 250 Sheryl Sandberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

52. “At Facebook, we try to be a strengths-based organization, which means we try to make jobs fit around people rather than make people fit around jobs. We focus on what people’s natural strengths are and spend our management time trying to find ways for them to use those strengths every day.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

53. “The things that hold women back, hold them back from sitting at the boardroom table and they hold women back from speaking at the PTA meeting.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

54. “Women need to shift from thinking “I’m not ready to do that” to thinking “I want to do that – and I’ll learn by doing it.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

55. “Most people assume that women are responsible for households and child care. Most couples operate that way – not all. That fundamental assumption holds women back.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

56. “I’m not writing about things other women do. I’m writing for other women to have more self-confidence because I need it myself! And if more women were in power, I would feel more comfortable.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

57. “It’s more pressure on women to – if they marry or partner with someone, to partner with the right person. Because you cannot have a full career and a full life at home with your children if you are also doing all of the housework and child care.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

58. “Framing the issue of work-life balance – as if the two were dramatically opposed – practically ensures work will lose out. Who would ever choose work over life?”

— Sheryl Sandberg

59. “It turns out that a husband who does the laundry, it’s very romantic when you’re older. And it’s hard to believe when you’re younger. But it’s absolutely true.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

60. “I just believed. I believed that the technology would change people’s lives. I believed putting real identity online – putting technology behind real identity – was the missing link.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

61. “Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

62. “Don’t make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you’re not even conscious you’re making.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

63. “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.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

64. “Success for me is that if my son chooses to be a stay-at-home parent, he is cheered on for that decision. And if my daughter chooses to work outside the home and is successful, she is cheered on and supported.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

65. “Men feel like they can be a professional and a father. For women it’s “or.” That’s offensive to me. The concept that it’s not possible is crazy.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

66. “I understood the power of the prayer “Let me not die while I am still alive.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

67. “Facebook is great for women and men. We are enormously flexible. We care a lot about great opportunities for women, we push ourselves to make things as flexible as possible.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

68. “Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity – and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

69. “I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek, I was a really serious geek in high school. It works out. Study harder.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

70. “I wish I were strong enough to ignore what others say, but experience tells me I often can’t. Allowing myself to feel upset, even really upset, and then move on – that’s something I can do.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

71. “Survivor guilt is a thief of joy – yet another secondary loss from death.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

72. “But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

73. “We’ve got to get women to sit at the table.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

74. “When I was in high school, I was voted most likely to succeed.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

75. “When woman work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

76. “Social gains are never handed out. They must be seized.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

77. “I am more vulnerable than I thought, but much stronger than I ever imagined.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

78. “Real change will come when powerful women are less of an exception. It is easy to dislike senior women because there are so few.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

79. “As a man gets more successful, powerful, he is more liked, and as a woman gets more successful, she is less liked, and that’s true by both women and men.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

80. “I really think we need more women to lean into their careers and to be really dedicated to staying in the work force.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

81. “Communication works best when we combine appropriateness with authenticity, finding that sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

82. “I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

83. “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.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

84. “I’m not pretending I can give advice to every single person or every single couple for every situation; I’m making the point that we are not going to get to equality in the workforce before we get to equality in the home. Not going to happen.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

85. “The most important thing is to have a more open and honest dialogue about gender issues.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

86. “It is illegal to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy or gender. It is not illegal to talk about it.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

87. “When we get feedback on women, we ask, “Is that real or is that the gender bias at play?” Everyone could start doing that today and I think we’d see really big results.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

88. “It’s a jungle gym, not a ladder.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

89. “The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all life involves suffering.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

90. “I have long believed that people need to feel supported and understood at work. I now know that this is even more important after tragedy. And sadly, it’s far less common than it should be.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

91. “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

92. “I spent most of my career, including my time at McKinsey, never acknowledging that I was a woman. And, you know, fast forward – I’m 43 now – fitting in is not helping us.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

93. “I have a five year-old son and a three year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home. And I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

94. “Both men and women react negatively when women negotiate on their own behalf. A man can just negotiate: “I have a better offer. That’s not enough to make my family’s ends meet.” No one feels bad about it. But when a woman does that, there’s a backlash.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

95. “Let’s have an honest conversation about what’s going on. A man and a man at a bar looks like mentoring. A man and a woman at a bar looks like dating.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

96. “Women don’t take enough risks. Men are just ‘foot on the gas pedal.’ We’re not going to close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

97. “Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face-and there will be barriers-be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

98. “The best decision I ever made was to marry Dave.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

99. “I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work with, all these fabulous women, ‘Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success.’ I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it’s not that simple.”

— Sheryl Sandberg

100. “And in situations where a man and a woman each receive negative feedback, the woman’s self-confidence and self-esteem drop to a much greater degree. The internalization of failure and the insecurity it breeds hurt future performance, so this pattern has serious long-term consequences.”

— Sheryl Sandberg