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 ?
MICHELLE OBAMAAm I good enough? Yes, I am.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.
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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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His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.
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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.
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Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.
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For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.
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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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Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts, good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt. They’re not painful. That’s not just with somebody you want to marry, but it’s with the friends that you choose. It’s with the people you surround yourselves with.
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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.
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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.
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If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.
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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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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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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






