Choose people who lift you up.
What sometimes is missing for young girls is that so early in our lives we’re shushed. And not just directly shushed. Sometimes we’re treated a little too preciously. They treat us like a doll. They don’t treat us like real beings, equal partners. I was loved early by my father, but I was never so precious that he didn’t think I could be there at the table.
Barack and I were both raised by families who didn’t have much in the way of money or material possessions but who had given us something far more valuable their unconditional love, their unflinching sacrifice, and the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.
If we don’t teach our young girls to speak at an early age, that doesn’t just happen.
It’s easier to hold onto your own stereotypes and misconceptions, it makes you feel justified in your own ignorance. That’s America. So the challenge for us is, are we ready for change?
Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.
I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.
Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.
You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.
Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation.
Shallow people believe in luck and in circumstances; Strong people believe in cause and effect.
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.
Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence – neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish – it is an imponderably valuable gift.
If you want to reach a state of bliss, then go beyond your ego and the internal dialogue. Make a decision to relinquish the need to control, the need to be approved, and the need to judge. Those are the three things the ego is doing all the time. It’s very important to be aware of them every time they come up.
The man who can make hard things easy is the educator.
Pleasure that is obtained by unreasonable and unsuitable cost, must always end in pain.
I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
Our own life has to be our message.
If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.
Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
