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Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.

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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Creation Live World Yourself
Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Afraid Focus Hope Inspirational Women Empowerment
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
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Failure Feeling Myself Plant Result Success
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

Alone Carry Challenge Change Deserve Existence History Remember See Tolerance
If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Character Quick Yourself
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,
MICHELLE OBAMA

Determination Myself Need People True Understand Voice
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
Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Control Focus Law Reading Yourself
there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Effort Limitation Reward
Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Person Rich Satisfaction
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

End Grow Up Yourself
Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Father Gift People Time
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
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 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

Care Education Health Pieces Truth
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Husband Myself Photograph Smile
It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Hard Time Pain Success
The lesson being that in life you control what you can.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Control Lesson Life Yourself
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Business Himself Mindset Problem See World
I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Comfortable Hate Honesty Myself
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Children Deep Grow Up Myself Philosophy Thinking
Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Fear Hide Mental People
Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Change Life Myself Patience Teaching
Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Kind Oppression Power Ugly
I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Hard Learning Myself
Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Education Goodness Promise Woman Empowerment Worth Yourself

Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.

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Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.

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