Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “A word now about the bar exam: It’s a necessary chore, a rite of passage for any just-hatched lawyer wishing to practice, and though the content and structure of the test itself vary somewhat from state to state, the experience of taking it – a two-day, twelve-hour exam meant to prove your knowledge of everything from contract law to arcane rules about secured transactions – is pretty much universally recognized as hellish.”

— Michelle Obama

202. “I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”

— Michelle Obama

203. “It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you’re asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else.”

— Michelle Obama

204. “A lot of young people think they’re invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads. Now young people can get insurance for as little as $50 a month, less than the cost of gym shoes.”

— Michelle Obama

205. “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?”

— Michelle Obama

206. “I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately – even alone.”

— Michelle Obama

207. “I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey. In sharing my story, I hope to help create space for other stories and other voices, to widen the pathway for who belongs and why.”

— Michelle Obama

208. “I am so tired of fear. And I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.”

— Michelle Obama

209. “We live by the paradigms we know.”

— Michelle Obama

210. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

211. “It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful – a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids – and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”

— Michelle Obama

212. “We need to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation. We have lost our way. And it begins with inspiration. It begins with leadership.”

— Michelle Obama

213. “Slowly but surely, we’re beginning to turn the tide on childhood obesity in America. Together, we are inspiring leaders from every sector to take ownership of this issue.”

— Michelle Obama

214. “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

215. “Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life.”

— Michelle Obama

216. “Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

— Michelle Obama

217. “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

218. “America is just downright mean.”

— Michelle Obama

219. “I admit it: I am louder than the average human being and have no fear of speaking my mind. These traits don’t come from the color of my skin but from an unwavering belief in my own intelligence.”

— Michelle Obama

220. “The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”

— Michelle Obama

221. “Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”

— Michelle Obama

222. “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. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.”

— Michelle Obama

223. “The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.”

— Michelle Obama

224. “You see, at the end of the day, my most important title is still ‘mom-in-chief.’ My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the center of my world.”

— Michelle Obama

225. “I come here tonight as a sister, blessed with a brother who is my mentor, my protector and my lifelong friend. And I come here as a wife who loves my husband and believes he will be an extraordinary president.”

— Michelle Obama

226. “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

227. “I’d been lucky to have parents, teachers, and mentors who’d fed me with a consistent, simple message: You matter. As an adult, I wanted to pass those words to a new generation.”

— Michelle Obama

228. “Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful – a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids – and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.”

— Michelle Obama

229. “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. I.”

— Michelle Obama

230. “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

231. “Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.”

— Michelle Obama

232. “Or as Barack had put it that night, you may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”

— Michelle Obama

233. “Some of my best memories are sitting on my dad’s lap, cheering on Olga and Nadia, Carl Lewis and others for their brilliance and perfection.”

— Michelle Obama

234. “In the Midwest... winter is an exercise in waiting – for relief, for a bird to sing, for the first purple crocus to push up through the snow.”

— Michelle Obama

235. “In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.”

— Michelle Obama

236. “Every day, through engagement in the arts, our children learn to open their imagination, to dream just a little bigger and to strive every day to reach those dreams.”

— Michelle Obama

237. “I let his voice be my comfort. It bore no trace of pain or self-pity, carrying only good humor and softness and just the tiniest hint of jazz. I lived on it as if it were oxygen. It was sustaining, and it was always enough.”

— Michelle Obama

238. “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 Obama

239. “Everyone seemed to fit in, except for me. I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go. I also realize that I was a long way, still, from finding my voice.”

— Michelle Obama

240. “Even when it’s not pretty or perfect, Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

— Michelle Obama

241. “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

242. “I belonged at Princeton, as much as anybody. And I came from the South Side of Chicago. It felt important to say out loud.”

— Michelle Obama

243. “I look back on the discomfort of that moment now and recognize the more universal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.”

— Michelle Obama

244. “People have notions of what a wife’s role should be in this process, and it’s been a traditional one of blind adoration. My model is a little different – I think most real marriages are.”

— Michelle Obama

245. “Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t at all smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”

— Michelle Obama

246. “One of the greatest lessons life has taught me is that adaptability and preparedness are paradoxically linked. For me, preparedness is part of the armor I wear. I plan, rehearse, and do my homework ahead of anything that feels even remotely like a test. This helps me to operate with more calm under stressful circumstances, knowing I will most often, regardless of what happens, find some pathway through. Being organized and prepared helps keep the floor feeling more solid beneath my feet.”

— Michelle Obama

247. “First and foremost, I wear what I love. That’s what women have to focus on: what makes them happy and what makes them feel comfortable and beautiful. If I can have any impact, I want women to feel good about themselves and have fun with fashion.”

— Michelle Obama

248. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

249. “The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. “What’s better for us?” Barack called to the people gathered in the room. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

— Michelle Obama

250. “As the dogs loped off to explore the perimeter of the yard, I ate my toast in the dark, feeling alone in the best possible way.”

— Michelle Obama