Michelle Obama

We explain when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you do not stoop to their level. Our motto is when they go low, you go high.

[on the 2016 election] When the most qualified person running was a woman, and look what we did instead, I mean that says something about where we are. That’s what we have to explore, because if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men… if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to… what, then we have to have those conversations with ourselves as women.

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

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?

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

Our life before moving to Washington was filled with simple joys. Saturdays at soccer games, Sundays at Grandma’s house. And a date night for Barack and me was either dinner or a movie, because as an exhausted mom, I couldn’t stay awake for both. He was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger-side door.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

That which we call character is a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain undemonstrable force, a familiar or genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

The moment we indulge our affections, the earth is metamorphosed, there is no winter and no night; all tragedies, all ennui s, vanish, all duties even.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it. Some Folks think they may Scold, Rail, Hate, Rob and Kill too; so it be but for God’s sake. But nothing in us unlike him, can please him.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

If you have only one smile in you give it to the people you love.