Michelle Obama

My last year in high school, I worked at a bindery, side by side with grown-ups who had been there their entire lives. Knowing that I, as a 16-year-old, was getting the same income and doing the same work… it gave me respect for those workers. But it also gave me an understanding that more is needed for folks to be able to cobble together a decent life on minimum wage.

I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is. The same thing is true in the work that I do. It’s all about me feeling where people are. So that’s why I try to be really present, even when I’m on a rope line. I never take for granted my interactions with people. And it’s never black-and-white. I’m usually reading the crowd, reading the people that I’m with. I guess if this role has changed me, it’s improved my ability to do that. I’ve gotten better at sensing where people are at any given time.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

How hard you work matters more than how much you make.

If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that.

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?

Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

Without Revolutionary theory, there can be no Revolutionary Movement.

But do the governors themselves need that? Are they ready to line up under the vertikal? They are. After all, the governors are part of the country, and they also suffer from management weaknesses. Not everyone is going to like everything. You can’t please everybody, but you can find some common approaches. I was also interested in learning more about the country. I had only ever worked in St. Petersburg, apart from the time I spent abroad. . . . Of course, my seven years of experience in Peter was good experience, both administrative and managerial. But Peter isn’t the whole country. I wanted to travel and see things. So, why did you drop that interesting job and go to work as director of the FSB? Do you have some affinity for the agencies? No. I wasn’t asked whether or not I wanted to go, and they had given me no inkling that I was even being considered for such an appointment. The president simply signed a decree. . . .

If Stain was such a bad guy why do all these people attribute to him quotes he didn’t make or change his actual quotes just enough to make them seem bad? Seem bad rather than visionary.

You have no right to criticise Russia over Chechnya.

The Russian parliament has condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

We need a president with tremendous intelligence, smarts, cunning, strength and stamina.

While capital is now highly mobile, labor is increasingly immobile – and that has immediate consequences. It means that it is easy to shift production to low-wage, high-repression areas of the world with low environmental standards.

The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

I’m not a politician.

We can win an awful lot of people into the political spectrum, by offering something that is … radical.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism, people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the menace.

Stop talking about how you care about people. Show me something. Show me a policy. Show me a policy where you take responsibility.

It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes.