Michelle Obama

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.

This generation, because of social media and the internet, kids are more exposed to more people and more cultures. I think that they are more open in ways. They are less tolerant of obvious inequities. This generation will look at what is happening now in the world and say, ‘This doesn’t feel right because this wasn’t what I was taught.’

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.

Barack didn’t just talk about hope because he thought it was just a nice slogan to get votes. I mean, he and I and so many believe that if you – what else do you have if you don’t have hope?

I wish that girls could fail as bad as men do and be okay.

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

In terms of doing work and in terms of learning and evolving as a person, you just grow more when you get more people’s perspectives… I really try and live the mission of the company and… keep everything else in my life extremely simple.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good paying job.

In the past, there has been a stigma surrounding community colleges, where they were seen as a less viable option because they are not four-year universities. I know differently and so do the millions of people across the country who have received an affordable, quality higher education at community college.

We seldom suffer from taking our subject of study too seriously, but we usually suffer when we take ourselves too seriously.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

As a kid I had a hard time reading in school. I was the kid who would go one period a day to the class for kids with learning disabilities.

Being a teacher is not what I do, it’s who I am.

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.

Because of the flexibility that community colleges afford, many students do not have to choose between an education and fulfilling other responsibilities – they can do both.

I went to college on an art scholarship at the American Academy of Art, but the education comes from being passionate about objects, spaces, colors and the way they affect your senses.