Michelle Obama

I will always be engaged in some way in public service and public life. The minute I left my corporate-law firm to work for the city, I never looked back. I’ve always felt very alive using my gifts and talents to help other people. I sleep better at night. I’m happier.

Choose people who lift you up.

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.

My most important title is “mom-in-chief”. My daughters are still the heart of my heart and the centre of my world.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.

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

The word terrorism has a meaning, it is defined in the US and international law and so on. But that’s not the definition we are allowed to use. We use the word terrorism in a way which means there’s terrorism against us but not our terrorism against them. That’s not terrorism. So for example, if we use the word “terrorism” in its litteral meaning, the most extreme terrorist operation in the world today would be Obama’s global assassination campaign, the drone campaign

If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven’t done much today.

The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.

There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such terror. Just a choice: Defeat it or be defeated by it. And defeat it we must.

The unjustified swelling of the budgetary deficit and the accumulation of public debts are just as destructive as adventurous stock-jobbing.

Hamas is regularly described as ‘Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.’ One will be hard put to find something like ‘democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus’-blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

Big institutions, like Goldman Sachs really don’t have to worry much about systemic risk because we don’t have a market system. So therefore they can run cap in hand to the nanny state and say ‘bail me out’ and that’s what happens.

Every day, you have the power to choose our better history – by opening your hearts and minds, by speaking up for what you know is right.

More time and at least a degree of reasonableness in the treatment of the Labour Party. Because the message that we’re putting out on austerity hasn’t fundamentally changed. There’s been an enormous barrier in getting it across, but now I think a lot of people understand what we’re saying and why we’re saying it.

The Israeli lobby has clout in the U.S., which means that re-arranging the region and controlling its resources one way or another, will serve Israel through its control over the American administration.

The most important thing is that Milosevic agreed to sit at the negotiating table with the Kosovo Albanians.

The very design of neoliberal principles is a direct attack on democracy.

[on Trump] The winning candidate, now the president-elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible.

The common good is the aspiration of all of us.

Who is going to help them abroad? They are just persecuted there. Conditions are created making their work impossible. This is a big mistake by those who are doing this in the West.