And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
MICHELLE OBAMAI hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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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Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
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It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
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failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
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In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
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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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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 wanted Americans to understand that words matter—that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.
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We live by the paradigms we know.
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Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.
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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?
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Even white people were recognizing him now.
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We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.
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It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
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Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.
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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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I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.
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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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Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
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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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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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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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It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.
MICHELLE OBAMA