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 OBAMAI 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.
More Michelle Obama Quotes
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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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My daughters are the heart of my heart and the center of my world.
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We live by the paradigms we know.
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When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.
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It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.
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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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When they go low, we go high.
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It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many angry black women have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?
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I hate diversity workshops. Real change comes from having enough comfort to be really honest and say something very uncomfortable.
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It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.
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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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Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.
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The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.
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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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Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.
MICHELLE OBAMA






