The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
MICHELLE OBAMA[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need. I understood that when I showed up somewhere,
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I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
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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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Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.
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Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.
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It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
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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.
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Even white people were recognizing him now.
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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.
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Am I good enough? Yes, I am.
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Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?
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There’s a power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s a grace in being willing to know and hear others.
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The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more.
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Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
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Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
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He’s always asking: ‘Is that new? I haven’t seen that before.’ It’s like, Why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.
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Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
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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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I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
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Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
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It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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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.
MICHELLE OBAMA