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 OBAMAHe’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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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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We live by the paradigms we know.
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Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.
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I have had to learn that my voice has value. And if I don’t use it, what’s the point of being in the room?
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Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t bad kids. They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.
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You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
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Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.
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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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just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
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I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
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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.
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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 ?
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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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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 -
We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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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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The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
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For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.
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And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.
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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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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.
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The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
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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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Here’s a memory, which like most memories is imperfect and subjective—collected long ago like a beach pebble and slipped into the pocket of my mind.
MICHELLE OBAMA -
America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.
MICHELLE OBAMA