Michelle Obama

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

We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.

Courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

Being president doesn’t change who you are – it reveals who you are.

We can never be complacent and think that we’ve arrived now as women. Because I hear this from young women. Some of you young women who aren’t feeling the pains that many of our predecessors have felt – you think, well, there aren’t any problems, women’s rights, we’ve got this all figured out, I’m already equal, I’m good – I’m just like, oh, just you wait, you’ll feel it. So the work continues.

We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.

A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential – there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

He is a benefactor of mankind who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and so recur habitually to the mind.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

People who work together will win, whether it be against complex football defenses, or the problems of modern society.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

Have the fearless attitude of a hero and the loving heart of a child.

Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.