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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

Michelle Obama

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
I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Change Goal Inspirational Myself Person
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
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
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?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Moments Myself See
I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Ambitious Force Intellectual Love Myself Possible
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Country Hate Language Myself Reflection Spirit True Understand Word
failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Failure Feeling Result
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.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Age Children Enough Investment Myself Survive Young
I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Beginning Beyond Hope Myself Place Understand
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
Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Alone Carry Deserve History See Tolerance
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
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

Carry Deserve Existence History Remember Tolerance
They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Home Investment
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
The burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Education Student
I like the idea of being rigorous about friendship.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Friendship Idea Myself
When they go low, we go high.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Inspirational One Liner Success
Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best things to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change
MICHELLE OBAMA

Change Focus Live Photograph Reality
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

Collection Imperfection Memories Mindset
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?
MICHELLE OBAMA

Learning Myself Value Voice
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

Care Fundamental Problem Thinking Time
People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.
MICHELLE OBAMA

People Powerful Strong Togetherness
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
The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.
MICHELLE OBAMA

Black Man Oppression Reality
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

Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.

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