Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The private area of the White House occupies about twenty thousand square feet on the top two stories of the main historical structure – the one you’d recognize from photos with its iconic white pillars.”

— Michelle Obama

352. “There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.”

— Michelle Obama

353. “Marriage, he told me early on, struck him as an unnecessary and overhyped convention.”

— Michelle Obama

354. “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. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me.”

— Michelle Obama

355. “Go forth with a spoonful of fear and return with a wagonful of competence.”

— Michelle Obama

356. “Millions of Americans who know that Barack understands their dreams; that Barack will fight for people like them; and that Barack will finally bring the change we need.”

— Michelle Obama

357. “As women, we cannot afford to neglect ourselves.”

— Michelle Obama

358. “Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him.”

— Michelle Obama

359. “Countries are stronger and more prosperous when the voices and opinions of all their citizens can be heard.”

— Michelle Obama

360. “They didn’t own a house. We were their investment, me and Craig. Everything went into us.”

— Michelle Obama

361. “Barack’s head was an overpacked suitcase of information, a mainframe from which he could seemingly pull disparate bits of data at will.”

— Michelle Obama

362. “I 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.”

— Michelle Obama

363. “I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what’re you thinking about over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said. “I was just thinking about income inequality.”

— Michelle Obama

364. “Strong men, strong men, men who are truly role models, don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful.”

— Michelle Obama

365. “I feel fortunate as a woman to have a husband who loves me and shows me in every way.”

— Michelle Obama

366. “It was possible, I knew, to live on two planes at once – to have one’s feet planted in reality but pointed in the direction of progress. It was what I had done as a kid on Euclid Avenue, what my family – and marginalized people more generally – had always done. You get somewhere by building that better reality, if at first only in your own mind. 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

367. “I had peers who were always a step or two ahead of me, whose achievements seemed effortless, but I tried not to let that get to me. I was beginning to understand that if I put in extra hours of studying, I often close the gap. I wasn’t a straight-A student, but I was always trying, and there were semesters when I got close.”

— Michelle Obama

368. “If you were a girl with a brain and a dawning sense that you wanted to grow into something more than a wife, Mary Tyler Moore was your goddess.”

— Michelle Obama

369. “America, our moment is now,” Barack said. “Our moment is now.”

— Michelle Obama

370. “Having lost a fifth-grade classmate to a house fire, having watched Suzanne die before she’d had a chance to really be an adult, I’d learned that the world could be brutal and random, that hard work didn’t always assure positive outcomes.”

— Michelle Obama

371. “No, I think that if he had known he would be president, he would have started dying his hair, like, 10 years ago. Now it’s too late.”

— Michelle Obama

372. “Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.”

— Michelle Obama

373. “I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.”

— Michelle Obama

374. “I’m not a big fan of young kids having Facebook. It’s not something they need. It’s not necessary.”

— Michelle Obama

375. “I’ve seen how the issues that come across a president’s desk are always the hard ones – the problems where no amount of data or numbers will get you to the right answer.”

— Michelle Obama

376. “Our presence in the White House had been celebrated by millions of Americans, but it also contributed to a reactionary sense of fear and resentment among others. The hatred was old and deep and as dangerous as ever.”

— Michelle Obama

377. “Twenty minutes later, I caught sight of Barack across the room, in the grips of what looked to be an endless conversation with the woman, who was doing a large portion of the talking. He shot me a look, implying that he’d like to be rescued. But he was a grown man. I let him rescue himself.”

— Michelle Obama

378. “I wasn’t particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law school.”

— Michelle Obama

379. “Studying in countries like China isn’t only about your prospects in the global marketplace. It’s not just about whether you can compete with your peers in other countries to make America stronger. It’s also about whether you can come together and work together with them to make our world stronger. It’s about the friendships you make, the bonds of trust you establish and the image of America that you project to the rest of the world.”

— Michelle Obama

380. “It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and I accommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them to ever 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

381. “It’s taken us time – years – to understand that this is just how each of us is built, that we are each the sum total of our respective genetic codes as well as everything installed in us by our parents and their parents before them.”

— Michelle Obama

382. “Voting, for me, was a habit, a healthy ritual to be done conscientiously and at every opportunity.”

— Michelle Obama

383. “Part-time work was meant to give me more freedom, but mostly it left me feeling as if I were only half doing everything, that all the lines in my life had been blurred.”

— Michelle Obama

384. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

385. “I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class.”

— Michelle Obama

386. “We were having an absurd and inappropriate argument because in the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and inappropriate.”

— Michelle Obama

387. “And it’s there, always, embedded in the hearts of children. Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their core.”

— Michelle Obama

388. “American citizens are for the most part far less cynical than their elected leaders.”

— Michelle Obama

389. “And what has been just completely heart warming is to see that people are really hungry for something different.”

— Michelle Obama

390. “One day I made note of a New York Times article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among American lawyers – most especially female ones. “How depressing,” I wrote in my journal.”

— Michelle Obama

391. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she said. “Because it’s too much money.” “That’s actually not for you to decide, Miche,” my dad said gently, almost offended. “And how are we supposed to decide, if we don’t even know about it?”

— Michelle Obama

392. “There were days, weeks, and months when I hated politics. And there were moments when the beauty of this country and its people so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t speak.”

— Michelle Obama

393. “This was not me and never would be. I could be supportive, but I couldn’t be a robot.”

— Michelle Obama

394. “She was also deep. It’s what I loved most about Santita. Like me, she could be frivolous and goofy when we were with a larger group, but on our own we’d get ponderous and intense, two.”

— Michelle Obama

395. “He had a simple, buoying faith that if you stuck to your principles, things would work out.”

— Michelle Obama

396. “If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job. If it didn’t work out on Election Day, this would be the end. Really and for real, this would be the end.”

— Michelle Obama

397. “I’d allowed myself to get trapped in my own head.”

— Michelle Obama

398. “My team and I persuaded Darden Restaurants, the parent company behind chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster, to make changes to the kinds of food it offered and how it was prepared. They pledged to revamp their menus, cutting calories, reducing sodium, and offering healthier options for kids’ meals.”

— Michelle Obama

399. “Believe it or not, when we were first married, our combined monthly student loan bills were actually higher than our mortgage.”

— Michelle Obama

400. “Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” she’d asked. “Don’t you think maybe you should be vice president or something first?”

— Michelle Obama