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If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

Michelle Obama

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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Children Learning Understand Value Wrong
It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Challenge Change Easy Feeling Justice
I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Learning Myself Value Voice
Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Age Children Enough Investment Myself Survive Young
just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Different Thinking Yourself
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Direction Live Plant Possible Success
The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Education Student
You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Attachment Experience Ocean Place Yourself
I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Ambitious Force Intellectual Love Myself Possible
I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Education Failure Grow Up Love Money Music Myself Start
failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Failure Feeling Result
We live by the paradigms we know.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Live One Liner
I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Believe Home Job Life Man Myself
Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Alone Carry Deserve History See Tolerance
For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Family Goal Live Marriage Myself
The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Easy Herself Oppression Voice Woman

If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

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If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

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