Michelle Obama

Studying in countries like China isn’t only about your prospects in the global marketplace. It’s not just about whether you can compete with your peers in other countries to make America stronger. It’s also about whether you can come together and work together with them to make our world stronger. It’s about the friendships you make, the bonds of trust you establish and the image of America that you project to the rest of the world.

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.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself, and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals.

Today Jazz music is performed and listened to by people of all ethnicity, backgrounds, ages and creeds.

When I get up and work out, I’m working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It’s just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.

It has to be a true partnership, and you have to really really like and respect the person you’re married to because it is a hard road.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

Sir, a man may be so much of everything, that he is nothing of anything.

So many objections may be made to everything, that nothing can overcome them but the necessity of doing something.

Very learned women are to be found, in the same manner as female warriors; but they are seldom or ever inventors.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

What could we accomplish if we knew we could not fail?

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.