Michelle Obama

I learned in those eight years is that home is where you make it, and we were in the White House for eight years, but it wasn’t the house. It was us in it. It was our value and our love for each other.

We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.

I’m a product of pop culture.

We get the leaders we vote for. We get the policies we vote for. And when we don’t vote, that’s when we wind up with government of, by and for other people.

If we want maturity, we have to be mature. If we want a nation that feels hopeful, then we have to speak in hopeful terms… We have to model what we want.

I love my husband, but my girlfriends are my sanity.

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Although some people felt Adolf Hitler was bad, he was a great man and a real conqueror whose name would never be forgotten.

Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply. Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

One should seek out an audience that matters — and furthermore (another important qualification), it should not be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We should not be speaking to, but with.

Look, freedom is an overwhelming American notion. The idea that we want to see the world, the peoples of the world free is something that all of us subscribe to.

One of the reasons the US wants to control the oil is because profits flow back and they flow in a lot of ways. Its not just oil profits, it’s also military sales. The biggest purchaser of US arms and probably British arms is either Saudi Arabia or UAE, one of the rich oil producers.

I would not take a decision that kills millions of people, I do not believe the threat of mass murder is a legitimate way to go about dealing with international relations.

[living at the White House] This isn’t about us. There’s so much history here that no one family can claim this space as their own.

I never attacked Rand Paul on his looks, and believe me, there’s plenty of subject matter right there.

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything – that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

At least in Russia, you cannot just go and tap into someone’s phone conversation without a warrant issued by court. That’s more or less the way a civilized society should go about fighting terrorism.

Powerful states have quite typically considered themselves to be exceptionally magnificent and the United States is no exception to that. The basis for it is not very substantial, to put it politely.

It’s only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it’s not terrorism.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That’s the way it’s done in the U.S., and that’s the way it’s done in Russia.