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 OBAMAEven 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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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[Y]ou may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.
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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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America, our moment is now, Barack said. Our moment is now.
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Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses, swapped back and forth and over again.
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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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there’s no straight line between effort and reward.
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At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.
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It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does.
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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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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.
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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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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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The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.
MICHELLE OBAMA