Daily Inspiration Quote by Doris Roberts

There is something refreshingly unsentimental about Doris Roberts’s blunt arithmetic: harmful people don’t get a second act in her personal story. “I cross them out” lands like a stage direction, not a therapy mantra. It’s not about “setting boundaries” in the soft-focus, self-help way; it’s the hard edit. The phrasing borrows from paperwork and scripts, the unglamorous mechanics of deciding what stays and what gets cut. Coming from an actress best known for playing a mother who could weaponize affection and guilt for laughs, the line reads like a private corrective: the joke stops where cruelty begins.

The intent is clear-eyed self-protection, but the subtext is more interesting. Roberts isn’t debating motives or asking us to empathize with the villain. She’s rejecting the cultural reflex to negotiate with bad behavior, especially the kind that hides behind family, tradition, or charm. “Mean, harmful, or evil” is a deliberately escalating triad: she starts with everyday nastiness, moves to damage, then names the moral category we’re often told is too judgmental to use. That escalation gives her permission to act decisively.

Context matters: an older woman in entertainment has spent decades being told to accommodate difficult men, difficult rooms, difficult “geniuses.” To “cross them out” is to reclaim authorship. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the myth that maturity means tolerance of everything. Roberts offers a different version of wisdom: not endurance, but refusal.