903 Quotes by Michelle Obama

  • Author Michelle Obama
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    So many of us go through life with our stories hidden, feeling ashamed or afraid when our whole truth doesn't live up to some established ideal. We grow up with messages that tell us there's only one way to be American -- that if our skin is dark or our hips are too wide, if we don't experience love in a particular way, if we speak another language or come from a different country, then we don't belong. That is, until someone dares to start telling that story differently. (From Becoming, 2018)

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once - to have one's feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I'd done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family - and marginalized people more generally - had always done. You get somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    Although my father was raised in the church, he wouldn't have prayed to God to spare him. He wouldn't have looked for alternative treatments or a guru or some faulty gene to blame. In my family, we have a long-standing habit of blocking out bad news, of trying to forget about it almost the moment it arrives.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    ...kids will invest more when they feel they're being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether an illness affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there should be no distraction.– Michelle Obama

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”It was a phrase borrowed from a book he’d read when he first started out as an organizer, and it would stay with me for years. It was as close as I’d come to understanding what motivated Barack. The world as it should be.

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  • Author Michelle Obama
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    When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I've learned it's harder to hate up close.

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