Michelle Obama

No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half its citizens.

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?

You cannot take your freedoms for granted. Just like generations who have come before you, you have to do your part to preserve and protect those freedoms… you need to be preparing yourself to add your voice to our national conversation.

The Affordable Care Act isn’t Barack’s legacy, it’s the country’s legacy.

Together, we can help make sure that every family that walks into a restaurant can make an easy, healthy choice.

Men don’t even ask that question, ‘What if it doesn’t happen?’ That’s what we do. That is a behavior of our gender. Speak up in all that tables we’re in.

It is beyond imagining in responsible circles that we might have some culpability for mass slaughter and destruction, or owe some debt to the millions of maimed and orphaned, or to the peasants who still die from exploding ordnance left from the U.S. assault…

We’re going to be campaigning on issues of social justice and poverty, you will be seeing a lot of me.

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts.

In the Soviet Union, it’s takes more courage to retreat than advance.

[on Donald Trump] seems determined to add to the dangers [in the global situation] by recklessly escalating the confrontation with North Korea, unilaterally launching missile strikes on Syria, opposing President Obama’s nuclear arms deal with Iran and backing a new nuclear arms race.

Once wide coercive powers are given to government agencies…such powers cannot be effectively controlled.

As we know, the goal of every struggle is victory. But if the proletariat is to achieve victory, all the workers, irrespective of nationality , must be united. Clearly, the demolition of national barriers and close unity between the Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Polish, Jewish and other proletarians is a necessary condition for the victory of the proletariat of all Russia.

Attention, must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries; it is not our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses’.

The idea that workers are only interested in horse-racing [odds] is an absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look at labour history or the lively and independent working class press that flourished in many places, including the manufacturing towns of New England…

Now the shift is toward trying to keep taxes just on wages and on consumption – which everyone has to do – not, say, on dividends, which only go to the rich. And that’s shifted the burden enormously.

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

I prefer to be in the grave in Colombia than in a jail cell in the United States.

When I read Paris Post-Modernist talk…what I see is intellectuals interacting with one another in ways which are incomprehensible to the public and, to be frank, incomprehensible to me.

And in my own life, in my own small way, I’ve tried to give back to this country that has given me so much. That’s why I left a job at a law firm for a career in public service, working to empower young people to volunteer in their communities. Because I believe that each of us – no matter what our age or background or walk of life – each of us has something to contribute to the life of this nation.