Michelle Obama Quotes

Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down, and trust your insticts. 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 you choose. It's with the people you surround yourself with.

Kamala went out and she worked hard in school, graduating from an HBCU, earning her law degree at a state school. And then she went on to work for the people fighting to hold law breakers accountable, strengthening the rule of law, fighting to get folks better wages, cheaper prescription drugs, a good education, decent healthcare, childcare, elder care. From a middle class household, Kamala worked her way up to become Vice President of the United States of America.

I wake up in a house that was built by slaves.

There’s nothing easy about finding your way through a world loaded with obstacles that others can’t or don’t see. When you are different, you can feel as if you’re operating with a different map, a different set of navigational challenges, than those around you. Sometimes, you feel like you have no map at all. Your differentness will often precede you into a room; people see it before they see you. Which leaves you with the task of overcoming

When we allow ourselves to celebrate tiny victories as important and meaningful, we start to understand the incremental nature of change — how one vote can help change our democracy; how raising a child who is whole and loved can help change a nation; how educating one girl can change a whole village for the better.

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.

So far in my life, I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a vice president at a hospital and the director of a nonprofit that helps young people build meaningful careers. I’ve been a working-class black student at a fancy mostly white college. I’ve been the only woman, the only African American, in all sorts of rooms. I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new mother, a daughter torn up by grief. And until recently, I was the First Lady of the United States of America — a job that’s not officially a job, but that nonetheless has given me a platform like nothing I could have imagined. It challenged me and humbled me, lifted me up and shrank me down, sometimes all at once. I’m just beginning to process what took place over these last years — from the moment in 2006 when my husband first started talking about running for president to the cold morning this winter when I climbed into a limo with Melania Trump, accompanying her to her husband’s inauguration. It’s been quite a ride.

[Barack's] always asking: "Is that new? I haven’t seen that before." It’s like, why don’t you mind your own business? Solve world hunger. Get out of my closet.

If you choose to try to make a life with another person, you will live by that choice. You'd find yourself having to choose again and again to remain rather than run. It helps if you enter into a committed relationship prepared to work, ready to be humbled and willing to accept and even enjoy living in that in-between space, bouncing between the poles of beautiful and horrible, sometimes in the span of a single conversation, sometimes over the course of years. And inside of that choice and those years you'll almost certainly come to see that there is no such thing as a 50-50 balance, instead it will be like beads on an abacus, sliding back and forth, the maths rarely tidy, the equation never quite solved....

It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

Of the two major candidates in this race, only Kamala Harris truly understands the unseen labor and unwavering commitment that has always made America great. Now, unfortunately, we know what comes next. We know folks are going to do everything they can to distort her truth. My husband and I, sadly, know a little something about this. For years, Donald Trump did everything in his power to try to make people fear us. See, his limited, narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black. Wait, I want to know: Who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those “Black jobs”?

What I knew from working in professional environments — from recruiting new lawyers for Sidley & Austin to hiring staff at the White House — is that sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.

You can't make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.

So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character and his convictions and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago.

When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. ...It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.