Daily Inspiration Quote by Doris Roberts

Roberts doesn’t soften the diagnosis: the problem isn’t just sexism “out there,” it’s the training that gets installed “in here.” “Taught to ask permission” lands as both social commentary and muscle-memory confession. She’s pointing to a gendered script so ordinary it disguises itself as politeness: defer, check in, be agreeable, don’t take up too much space. The line works because it frames constraint as pedagogy, not personality. If it’s taught, it can be unlearned.

The pivot from “women” to “we” is the tell. Roberts isn’t scolding from a distance; she’s implicating herself, speaking from inside the habit. That “we don’t realize” is doing heavy lifting: it suggests the most effective limits are the ones you don’t experience as limits. Permission-seeking becomes a default setting, shaping everything from career choices to emotional boundaries, from negotiating pay to deciding whether your anger is “allowed.”

Then she drops the word “entitled,” which is usually deployed as an insult, especially toward women. Here it’s reclaimed as a civic and personal right: entitlement as rightful ownership of your voice, your time, your decisions. Coming from an actress whose career spanned eras when women were routinely typecast, managed, and softened for public consumption, the remark reads like post-fame clarity: the real battle is not only against gatekeepers but against the internalized need for a gate. “We do have a say” is deceptively simple, almost parental in tone, but it’s radical precisely because it treats agency as something women have been trained to forget.