Sheryl Sandberg Quotes

Being confident and believing in your own self-worth is necessary to achieving your potential.

I had heard that when people lost people, there was anger. But I definitely experienced it a lot more than I was prepared for it. Anger was not something I'd ever really felt in my life and I was not prepared for it.

I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way.

Coming from Google, you don't exactly spend a lot of time at Microsoft.

Done is better than perfect.

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.

You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it's easy. I work long hours.

I feel really grateful to the people who encouraged me and helped me develop. Nobody can succeed on their own.

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.

Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst.

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.

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

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.

A woman, if you're Most Intelligent or Most Likely to Succeed, that's an embarrassing thing. Or something that's not considered attractive, and I think that's what we need to change.

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

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren't afraid? And then go do it.

Every woman I know, particularly the senior ones, has been called too aggressive at work. We know in gender blind studies that men are more aggressive in their offices than women. We know that. Yet we're busy telling all the women that they're too aggressive. That's the issue.

Women have made tons of progress. But we still have a small percentage of the top jobs in any industry, in any nation in the world. I think that's partly because from a very young age, we encourage our boys to lead and we call our girls bossy.

People think that women don't negotiate because they're not good negotiators, but that's not it. Women don't negotiate because it doesn't work as well for them. Women have to say, 'I really add a lot of value, and it's in your interest to pay me more.' I hate that advice, but I want to see women get ahead.

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.

We're the only developed country in the world that doesn't have paid maternity leave. Paternity leave is just as important. Paid family medical leave so that you can take care of a parent, a child, a grandparent, whatever you need to do. I think we're shortsighted when we don't invest in our employees as companies, and as an economy, because we invest in them and they invest back in us.

There's a lot that needs to be fixed in dating for men and women in the U.S. - there's a lot of pressure on women to do things they may not want to do. And if you start out unequal, you are not going to end up with equality.

Give us a world where half our homes are run by men and half our institutions are run by women. I'm pretty sure that would be a better world.

Sixty-four percent of managers in the U.S. are afraid to be alone in a room with a woman. Mentoring is all about being alone in a room with someone. Let's start talking about this honestly. The lack of equal access is the silent killer for women and no one wants to talk about it.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. There is work, there is life, and there is no balance.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." (Harvard Business School definition of leadership)

Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoid unnecessary sacrifice.

The most important thing we're doing differently is that we talk openly about gender at Facebook.

Go to a playground: Little girls get called 'bossy' all the time, a word that's almost never used for boys. And that leads directly to the problems women face in the workforce. When a man does a good job, everyone says, 'That's great.' When a woman does that same thing, she'll get feedback that says things like, 'Your results are good, but your peers just don't like you as much' or 'maybe you were a little aggressive.'

We need to start talking about child-rearing in the workplace.

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.

The cost of stability is often diminished opportunities for growth.

If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, 'I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?' If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard.

I have never worked for a woman, and I have never worked with a lot of women.

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.

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?

Facebook is a really exciting place trying to do something really important that I really believe in. And it matters.

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.

There's no easy path through grief and trauma. Learning from the experiences of people who'd been through similar losses was helpful.

We [Facebook] really believe in enabling people to be their authentic selves on the web, and enabling people to communicate directly with each other in a very personal way.

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.

A lot of people will say, "what's Facebook's business model?" I always find that a kind of funny question. Our business model is out there, which is: we monetize largely through advertising and a little bit through the gift revenue, the virtual gifts we have on our site. I think those continue to be the most promising avenues going forward.

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.

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

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.

Nobody can succeed on their own.

When you want to change things, you won't please everyone.

When companies offer support and assistance for personal and family hardships, their employees become more loyal and more productive.