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 OBAMAI 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.
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No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.
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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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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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Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.
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The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
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Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.
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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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Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?
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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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I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
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We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.
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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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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