Top 450 Michelle Obama Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful...”

— Michelle Obama

402. “I’d seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective.”

— Michelle Obama

403. “I also learned that being rich didn’t protect you from failure.”

— Michelle Obama

404. “Two months later, just weeks before the election, a tape would surface of Donald Trump in an ungaurded moment, bragging to a TV host in 2005 about sexually assaulting women, using language so lewd and vulgar that it put media outlets in a quandary about how to quote it without violating the established stamdards of decency. In the end, the standards of decency were simply lowered in order to make room for the candidate’s voice.”

— Michelle Obama

405. “Read books by people whose perspective is different from yours, listen to voices you haven’t heard before, look for narratives that are new to you. In them and with them, you might end up finding more room for yourself.”

— Michelle Obama

406. “I knew I was no smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought about this more often now that I was an adult, especially when people applauded me for my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel randomness to it all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of learning. I’d seen enough at this point to understand how quickly even small deficits can snowball, too.”

— Michelle Obama

407. “I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

409. “But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”

— Michelle Obama

410. “If I point to anything that makes me who I am, it’s that I have a whole lot of common sense. I’ve got a good mind and a good ability to read people and situations.”

— Michelle Obama

411. “They’re not special at all. The South Side is filled with kids like that.”

— Michelle Obama

412. “Three times over the course of the fall of 2011, Barack proposed bills that would create thousands of jobs for Americans, in part by giving states money to hire more teachers and first responders. Three times the Republicans blocked them, never even allowing a vote.”

— Michelle Obama

413. “I considered all these people, current and former staff, to be family. And I was so proud of what we’d done.”

— Michelle Obama

414. “If anyone in our family wanted to step outside onto the Truman Balcony – the lovely arcing terrace that overlooked the South Lawn, and the only semiprivate outdoor space we had at the White House – we needed to first alert the Secret Service so that they could shut down the section of E Street that was in view of the balcony, clearing out the flocks of tourists who gathered outside the gates there at all hours of the day and night.”

— Michelle Obama

415. “What I want to say, then, is stay vigorous and faithful, humble and empathetic. Tell the truth, do your best by others, keep perspective, understand history and context. Stay prudent, stay tough, and stay outraged. But more than anything, don’t forget to do the work.”

— Michelle Obama

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

— Michelle Obama

417. “I can hurt you and get away with it. Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities – in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal.”

— Michelle Obama

418. “Because what was a basketball game if not a showcase of boys?”

— Michelle Obama

419. “You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip.”

— Michelle Obama

420. “It was as if he’d surrendered a part of himself as a way of coping.”

— Michelle Obama

421. “If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.”

— Michelle Obama

422. “I’d said it casually, but the phrase caught hold and was amplified across the press. Some Americans seemed to embrace it, understanding all too well the amount of organization and drive it takes to raise children. Others, meanwhile, seemed vaguely appalled, presuming it to mean that as First Lady I’d do nothing but pipe-cleaner craft projects with my kids.”

— Michelle Obama

423. “When I was younger, I could eat whatever I wanted, as long as I exercised; or if I didn’t exercise and just watched what I ate, I’d maintain. Now I have to do both.”

— Michelle Obama

424. “I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.”

— Michelle Obama

425. “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

426. “That’s what tools are for. They help keep us upright and balanced, better able to coexist with uncertainty. They help us deal with flux, to manage when life feels out of control. And they help us continue onward, even while in discomfort, even as we live with our strands exposed.”

— Michelle Obama

427. “We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent.”

— Michelle Obama

428. “The last commencement I attended that spring was personal – Malia’s graduation from Sidwell Friends, held on a warm day in June.”

— Michelle Obama

429. “It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.”

— Michelle Obama

430. “Almost from the minute we agreed it would be ok for him to run, Barack became a kind of human blur, a pixelated version of the guy I knew-.”

— Michelle Obama

431. “The unknown is where possibility glitters.”

— Michelle Obama

432. “Barack’s safety was something I didn’t want to think about, let alone discuss.”

— Michelle Obama

433. “I mean, hope doesn’t get actualized in three and a half years. If that were the case, we’d be out of luck as a country.”

— Michelle Obama

434. “I would be depressed if I felt I could never eat the things that I love. I also don’t want my girls to be obsessed about food.”

— Michelle Obama

435. “Barack was now surrounded by people whose job was to treat him like a precious gem. It sometimes felt like a throwback to some lost era...”

— Michelle Obama

436. “Change happens one person at a time.”

— Michelle Obama

437. “That day, I stared for a few extra seconds at the little oblong bubble next to my husband’s name for president of the United States. After almost twenty-one months of campaigning, attacks, and exhaustion, this was it – the last thing I needed to do. Barack glanced my way and laughed. “You still trying to make up your mind?” he said. “Need a little more time?”

— Michelle Obama

438. “Unspoken was the fact that he could just go. He could walk out the door and catch a cab to the airport and still make it to Springfield in time to vote. He could leave his sick daughter and fretting wife halfway across the Pacific and go join his colleagues. It was an option. But I wasn’t going to martyr myself by suggesting it.”

— Michelle Obama

439. “How do we build places where gladness lives – for ourselves and for others, and most especially for children – and to which we will always want to return?”

— Michelle Obama

440. “When I thought I had a good idea about something, I didn’t like being told no.”

— Michelle Obama

441. “The challenge in leading a big life becomes trying to find ways to protect your dreams and your drive, to remain tough without being overly guarded, to stay nimble and open to growth, allowing others to see you for who you are. It’s about learning how to shelter your flame without hiding its light.”

— Michelle Obama

442. “Being busy is a kind of tool this way. It’s like giving yourself a suit of armor to wear: If someone’s shooting arrows in your direction, you’re less likely to register any hits. There simply isn’t time.”

— Michelle Obama

443. “To me, there was magic in the learning.”

— Michelle Obama

444. “America is not a simple place. Its contradictions set me spinning. I’d found myself at Democratic fund-raisers held in vast Manhattan penthouses, sipping wine with wealthy women who would claim to be passionate about education and children’s issues and then lean in conspiratorially to tell me that their Wall Street husbands would never vote for anyone who even thought about raising their taxes.”

— Michelle Obama

445. “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.”

— Michelle Obama

446. “You’ve leaped but you haven’t landed. You can’t know yet how the future’s going to feel. After months of everything going too fast, time slows to an agonizing crawl.”

— Michelle Obama

447. “If you’ve never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron-gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and daytime, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There’s ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped.”

— Michelle Obama

448. “Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands being bold.”

— Michelle Obama

449. “Barack was a black man in America, after all. I didn’t really think he could win.”

— Michelle Obama

450. “He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good.”

— Michelle Obama