Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.
MICHELLE OBAMADominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television, but still want a framed keepsake for their mantel.
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there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
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At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
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Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child – What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.
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Even white people were recognizing him now.
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I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
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I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
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The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
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The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
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Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
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But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.
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For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.
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Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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Everything was not lost. This was the message we needed to carry forward. It’s what I truly believed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our reality—the world as it is. We needed now to be resolute, to keep our feet pointed in the direction of progress.
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Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an angry black woman. I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it angry or black or woman ?
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Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
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As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.
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Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
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The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
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a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.
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What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
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You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
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This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path–the my-isn’t-that-impressive- path– and keep you there for a long time.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
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The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA