The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
MICHELLE OBAMAI 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
-
-
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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 -
there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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 -
Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
When they go low, we go high.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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 ?
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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?
MICHELLE OBAMA -
The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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 -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
MICHELLE OBAMA