She couldn't quite shatter the glass ceiling in 2008, but she vowed that the "18 million cracks" she had etched in it would help ensure it would yield in the end.
Don't tell people you're going to change their world or that your opponents would shatter it.
So could he be the person to shatter a stale consensus that endures from fear of seeming soft?
"[W]e weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time," she said in her concession speech.
By contrast, it is precisely judgmental and pejorative to shatter the global legal consensus by implying that east Jerusalem is not occupied and belongs to Israel.
But Jeff Guinn's Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson will at least shatter your illusion that most people, given the option, would choose a better family for themselves than the one they are born in.
Describing Beard's pleasure at eating a crisp, he wrote: "The trick was to set the fragment at the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth".
The former chancellor of the exchequer – who had reluctantly agreed to head the campaign to save the 307-year-old union between Scotland and England – had been informed that David Cameron was planning to shatter two years of cross-party cooperation by playing the English card.
The response – brutally honest and also artfully calculated – intimated a self-image problem Putin attempted to shatter.
There are a lot of crates, a lot of strange machines, a lot of explosive pods that deplete my ammo or shatter inconveniently mid-battle.
This will shatter the NHS into local hubs, each with its own budget and administration.
