“The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”

Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?

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.

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.

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.

When they go low, we go high.

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.

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 ?

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

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.

They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.

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.

a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.

At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.

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.

Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.

The present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.

I really hope that I can be helpful in that journey because I do believe that women deserve the same pay. We work just as hard as men do. I’ve been working, playing tennis, since I was three years old. And to be paid less just because of my sex – it doesn’t seem fair.

There is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it.

Every girl is beautiful if they have the ability to believe in themselves.

Don’t let your fears overwhelm your desire. Let the barriers you face-and there will be barriers-be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold, and I promise that you will never know what you’re capable of unless you try.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

I always believe I can beat the best, achieve the best. I always see myself in the top position.