Ruth Handler Quotes
101 Ruth Handler Quotes (Barbie Quotes, Mattel Quotes)
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Don’t dwell on what happened, no matter how bad it was. Find something else to do. Find something to do to help others.
Ruth Handler
[At the age of 78] I’ve been proving myself my whole life. I still am.
Ruth Handler
[On the philosophy behind Barbie] My whole philosophy was that through the doll, a little girl could be anything she wanted to be.
Ruth Handler
Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.
Ruth Handler
[On her husband Elliot Handler she was married to for 60 years and who name she used with Harold ‘Matt’ Matson to create the toy company Mattel - the worlds largest toy company (Matt +el (From ‘el’liot) (Matt exited the company in 1947 only three years after they founded it. Ruth and Elliot Handler were the real drivers.)] From the first day I met Elliot I admired his immense artistic and creative talents. Elliot, in turn, respected my talents: self-confidence… and above all, my willingness to attack the impossible.
Ruth Handler
[On the Barbie Doll she created] She became not just a doll. She became part of that child through those growing up years. Many of those children set their life’s dreams, their goals, through Barbie. Many of them said Barbie helped them achieve those dreams. That’s a pretty heavy thing, but it’s true.
Ruth Handler
I rebuilt my self-esteem and I rebuilt the self-esteem of others.
Ruth Handler
I like to think of my life as an impossible dream.
Ruth Handler
I’ve had a lot of nightmares, but I’ve always been able to pick up and move on.
Ruth Handler
We never copied people, ever.
Ruth Handler
In the toy business, you live or die with the quality of the projection you make. Your lead times are very long, and the commitments you make very early influence how many you make or ship and whether you get stuck with what you do.
Ruth Handler
They would reflect their dreams of their future through their play with these adult… dolls.
Ruth Handler
[As ten year old child working every day after school as a cashier, waitress and soda jerk.] I simply preferred working over playing with other kids.
Ruth Handler
I am breaking the mold. I shall have a career.
Ruth Handler
There’s still a lot of fight in me, and perhaps the fight’s the thing.
Ruth Handler
I took the old-time companies that were self-satisfied and smug and shook them up.
Ruth Handler
Helping other women became the answer to helping myself. I regained my self-esteem.
Ruth Handler
Little girls just want to be bigger girls.
Ruth Handler
We never entered any business the same way other people entered. We never copied people, ever.
Ruth Handler
I grew up with the idea that a woman – a mother – with a job was neither strange nor unnatural.
Ruth Handler
I was busier than a cockroach.
Ruth Handler
Busy, busy, busy.
Ruth Handler
The industry was just going frantic with demand for Barbie…
Ruth Handler
Anyone can manage the upside cycle of hit toys. The secret is managing a product down its life cycle properly.
Ruth Handler
When I conceived Barbie, I believe it was important for little girls’ self-esteem to play with a doll that has breasts. Now I find it even more important to return that self-esteem to woman who have lost theirs.
Ruth Handler
I realized that experimenting with the future from a safe distance through pretend play was a very important part of growing up.
Ruth Handler
I believed it was important to a little girl’s self-esteem to play with a doll that has breasts.
Ruth Handler
I had a lawyer who did not believe in my innocence.
Ruth Handler
[On life after Mattel] I couldn’t just screech to a halt after racing my whole life.
Ruth Handler
In those days back when I started the business, there were no other women running a company. The biggest hurdle for me was to be accepted as a boss, and as a leader. In retrospect, the fact that I was a woman was sort of an advantage because men didn’t know how to react or read me.
Ruth Handler
[On having to have a mastectomy in 1970, 26 year after founding Mattel] Breast cancer destroyed my self-confidence. The image of myself was shattered. I wanted to retain my femininity in a world of men. People had wanted me to be a real rough gal but for years I exercised and kept my figure so I would retain that soft femininity. But to me, losing a breast was such a terrible blow to my self-esteem.
Ruth Handler
[On returning to Mattel after her mastectomy due to breast cancer] Because I believed my femininity and attractiveness were gone, my self confidence was gone too.
Ruth Handler
My older sister was a leader in the business world. She helped me believe that I, also, could do that.
Ruth Handler
I never formed the kind of intense friendships that most kids build their childhood around.
Ruth Handler
[On her career in 1944 with a 3 year old daughter] One option was to wait until the children were grown before I returned to work, but that prospect filled me with dismay. What if by then, I’d lost my spark, my ambition, my powers of persuasion?
Ruth Handler
[On the first Barbie doll named after her daughter Barbara] Here were the breasts, the small waist, the long, tapered legs I had enthusiastically described all those years ago.
Ruth Handler
I realized if we could three-dimensionalize the adult paper dolls, we’d meet a very basic play need.
Ruth Handler
I was worried that if Barbie was too glamorous, little girls wouldn’t be able to identify with her.
Ruth Handler
[On the comments by male toy buyers on the first ‘Barbie’ doll] Each said ‘Ruth, you’ve made a major mistake with this doll. Little girls want cutesy, cuddly baby dolls. They all want to pretend to be mommies.’ No, little girls want to pretend to be bigger girls.
Ruth Handler
[On the first night of the Toy Show showing ‘Barbie’.] I went to my hotel room and burst into tears of grief. My baby had been rejected. [However in the first year it flew off the shelves and it would take Mattel three years to catch up with consumer demand.]
Ruth Handler
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