Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Our afternoons together taught me that there was no formula for motherhood. No single approach could be deemed right or wrong. This was useful to see. Regardless of who was living which way and why, every small child in that playroom was cherished and growing just fine.”

— Michelle Obama

302. “I couldn’t help but notice who among my friends had more bracelets or Barbies than I did, or who got to buy their clothes at the mall instead of having a mom who sewed everything on the cheap using Butterick patterns at home. 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

303. “So many of my friends judged potential mates from the outside in, focusing first on their looks and financial prospects. If it turned out the person they’d chosen wasn’t a good communicator or was uncomfortable with being vulnerable, they seemed to think time or marriage vows would fix the problem. But Barack arrived in my life a wholly formed person. From our very first conversation, he’d shown me that he wasn’t self-conscious about expressing fear or weakness and that he valued being truthful.”

— Michelle Obama

304. “On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.”

— Michelle Obama

305. “I’m varying my workouts so it’s not just cardio but also includes moves to maintain my flexibility.”

— Michelle Obama

306. “She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. Get over it and just live a little was her message.”

— Michelle Obama

307. “Ahora comprendo que incluso un matrimonio feliz puede ser agotador, que es un contrato que debe renovarse una y otra vez, discreta y calladamente, o incluso a solas.”

— Michelle Obama

308. “My friends made me whole, as they always have and always will.”

— Michelle Obama

309. “I do recognize the value of individuals having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams,” I wrote in my journal. “But I don’t believe that the pursuit of one person’s dreams should come at the expense of the couple.”

— Michelle Obama

310. “Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?”

— Michelle Obama

311. “Ghetto” signaled that a place was both black and hopeless. It was a label that foretold failure and then hastened its arrival.”

— Michelle Obama

312. “When you start to rewrite the story of not-mattering, you start to find a new center. You remove yourself from other people’s mirrors and begin speaking more fully from your own experience, your own knowing place. You become better able to attach to your pride and more readily step over all the despites. It doesn’t remove the obstacles, but I’ve found that it helps to shrink them. It helps you to count your victories, even the small ones, and know that you’re doing okay.”

— Michelle Obama

313. “The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.”

— Michelle Obama

314. “I’d greet him with a playful fist bump onstage at an event in Minnesota, which would then make headlines, interpreted by one Fox commentator as a “terrorist fist jab,” again suggesting that we were dangerous.”

— Michelle Obama

315. “I think what I experienced during those years is what many did – a sense of progress, the comfort of compassion, the joy of watching the unsung and invisible find some light. A glimmer of the world as it could be. This was our bid for permanence: a rising generation that understood what was possible – and that even more was possible for them. Whatever was coming next, this was a story we could own.”

— Michelle Obama

316. “He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything.”

— Michelle Obama

317. “Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”

— Michelle Obama

318. “In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?”

— Michelle Obama

319. “His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.”

— Michelle Obama

320. “I tried not to feel intimidated when classroom conversation was dominated by male students, which it often was. 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

321. “As Americans obsessed over the threat of terrorism, many were overlooking the racism and tribalism that were tearing our nation apart.”

— Michelle Obama

322. “I wanted Americans to understand that words matter – that the hateful language they heard coming from their TVs did not reflect the true spirit of our country and that we could vote against it.”

— Michelle Obama

323. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

324. “I spent much of 2008 trying not to worry about the punches.”

— Michelle Obama

325. “It was a small but life-changing move. I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach. 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

326. “Failure is a feeling long before it is an action.”

— Michelle Obama

327. “Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin.”

— Michelle Obama

328. “Our differences are treasures and they’re also tools. They are useful, valid, worthy, and important to share. Recognizing this, not only in ourselves but in the people around us, we begin to rewrite more and more stories of not-mattering. We start to change the paradigms around who belongs, creating more space for more people. Step by step by step, we can lessen the loneliness of not-belonging.”

— Michelle Obama

329. “We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”

— Michelle Obama

330. “I will forever associate with New Yorkers – an instinctive and immediate push back against thinking small. She climbed out of the car, giving me no choice but to drive. ‘Get over it and just live a little’ was her message.”

— Michelle Obama

331. “Discriminating against same-sex couples just isn’t right.”

— Michelle Obama

332. “My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. 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

333. “I try to tell young people to get in shape now, because it’s easier. If you’re 30 and want to drop 10 pounds, all you have to do is just walk.”

— Michelle Obama

334. “We’d aligned ourselves with different foundations and food suppliers to install six thousand salad bars in school cafeterias and were recruiting local chefs to help schools serve meals that were not just healthy but tasty.”

— Michelle Obama

335. “Whatever deficits I might have arrived with, coming from an inner-city high school, it seemed that I could make up for them by putting in extra time, asking for help when I needed it, and learning to pace myself and not procrastinate.”

— Michelle Obama

336. “America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not?”

— Michelle Obama

337. “When you’re First Lady, America shows itself to you in its extremes.”

— Michelle Obama

338. “This is doable, of course – minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time – but it takes energy. It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intramural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.”

— Michelle Obama

339. “But my first months at Whitney Young gave me a glimpse of something that had previously been invisible – the apparatus of privilege and connection, what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead, ready to connect some but not all of us to the sky.”

— Michelle Obama

340. “The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.”

— Michelle Obama

341. “Over the years I’ve become more confident in people’s ability to recognize a good thing.”

— Michelle Obama

342. “Education had been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world.”

— Michelle Obama

343. “Optimism reigned in my family’s little apartment on Euclid Avenue. I saw it in my father, in the way he moved around as if nothing were wrong with his body, as if the disease that would someday take his life just didn’t exist.”

— Michelle Obama

344. “What struck me was how assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why.”

— Michelle Obama

345. “My purpose had always been to see past my neighborhood – to look ahead and overcome.”

— Michelle Obama

346. “Every move she made, I realize now, was buttressed by the quiet confidence that she’d raised us to be adults. Our decisions were on us. It was our life, not hers, and always would be.”

— Michelle Obama

347. “I felt it then – the power of what we were doing, the significance of the ritual – as we stood there with our future still unwritten, with every unknown still utterly unknown, just gripping each other’s hands as we said our vows.”

— Michelle Obama

348. “There was also a nearby Container Store and a Chipotle, which made things even better. This was my place.”

— Michelle Obama

349. “I hate fund-raising. Haaaaate it. Hate, hate it.”

— Michelle Obama

350. “When rumors about the so-called whitey tape surfaced, a friend who knows me well called up, clearly worried that the lie was true. I had to spend a good thirty minutes convincing her that I hadn’t turned into a racist, and when the conversation ended, I hung up, thoroughly demoralized.”

— Michelle Obama