Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— 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. “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

208. “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

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

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Michelle Obama

215. “America is just downright mean.”

— Michelle Obama

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton material.” Her judgment was as swift as it was dismissive, probably based on a quick-glance calculus involving my grades and test scores.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “As a mom, I know it is my responsibility, and no one else’s, to raise my kids. But we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean when so many parents are finding their best efforts undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at our kids.”

— 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. “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

245. “The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.”

— Michelle Obama

246. “If proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.”

— Michelle Obama

247. “Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs.”

— Michelle Obama

248. “It was possible... to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. You got somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind... You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”

— Michelle Obama

249. “This is what a control freak learns inside the compressed otherworld of college, maybe above all else: There are simply other ways of being.”

— Michelle Obama

250. “This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of dim comfort. Usually, work was work and home was home, but for us, as for many people, the tragedy in Newtown shattered every window and blew down every fence. When I walked into the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was nothing to say. No words.”

— Michelle Obama