Michelle Obama, an American lawyer and author, was first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She held this position for the first time as an African-American woman. She is married to former President Barack Obama.
She is a Chicago native who was raised on the South Side, is a Princeton and Harvard Law School alum. She met Barack Obama while working at the law firm Sidley Austin early in her legal career. She later served as the vice president for community and external affairs of the University of Chicago Medical Center, and was an associate dean of student services at the University of Chicago. In 1992, Michelle married Barack; the couple has two daughters.
75 Michelle Obama Quotes
- “Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered.”
2. “When they go low, we go high.”
3. “Most people were good people if you just treated them well.”
4. “Failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”
5. “You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen.”
6. “His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.”
7. “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
8. “Grief and resilience live together.”
9. “Being different conditions you toward cautiousness, even as it demands being bold.”
10. “No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.”
Michelle Obama Inspirational Quotes
11. “Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result”
12. “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”
13. “We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”
14. “You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far.”
15. “There are truths we face and truths we ignore.”
16. “When voters got to see me as a person, they understood that the caricatures were untrue. I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.”
17. “Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.”
18. “Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
19. “The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.”
20. “Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit.”
Michelle Obama Quotes On Education and Ambition
21. “Failure is a feeling long before it is an action.”
22. “People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.”
23. “Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses”
24. “The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.”
25. “I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achievement.”
26. “I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine.”
27. “I also learned that being rich didn’t protect you from failure.”
28. “Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
29. “Strong men, strong men, men who are truly role models, don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful.”
Michelle Obama Famous Quotes
30. “The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.”
31. “I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.”
32. “I endured misery for the sake of appearances.”
33. “Inspiration on its own was shallow; you had to back it up with hard work.”
34. “He had a simple, buoying faith that if you stuck to your principles, things would work out.”
35. “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
36. “But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result.”
37. “The lesson being that in life you control what you can.”
38. “Focus on what you can control. Be a good person every day. Vote. Read. Treat one another kindly. Follow the law. Don’t tweet nasty stuff.”
39. “Education had been the primary instrument of change in my own life, my lever upward in the world.”
40. “Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”
Motivational Michelle Obama Quotes
41. “I think my parents appreciated my feistiness and I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted to keep lit.”
42. “It was painful, but time pushed us all forward.”
43. “They weren’t striving for perfect, but managed somehow to be always excellent,”
44. “I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.”
45. “Looking back on it now, I think my parents appreciated my feistiness and I’m glad for it. It was a flame inside me they wanted to keep lit.”
46. “We’re strong and we’re smart, and so are our kids. We’ll be just fine. We can afford this.”
47. “We understood, in other words, how ridiculously fortunate we were, and we both felt an obligation not to be complacent.”
48. “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?”
49. “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.”
50. “Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”
Short Michelle Obama Quotes
51. “Optics would always rule our lives.”
52. “Change happens one person at a time.”
53. “This was simply my reality. I couldn’t be shy or embarrassed about my needs.”
54. “He was the sort of person who accepted what came and just kept moving forward.”
55. “To me, there was magic in the learning”
56. “Always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody says distract you from your goals.”
57. “your entire history, including your social associations, professional choices, and tax returns.”
58. “Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
59. “Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.”
60. “In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.”
Michelle Obama Quotes On Failure and Change
61. “There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish.”
62. “You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away,”
63. “I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.”
64. “He just used solid information as a means of unbundling the threat and giving me tools to stay safe.”
65. “I wanted to not know that fact for as long as I possibly could.”
66. “Look how I’m managing, I wanted to say in those moments, to my audience of no one. Does everyone see that I’m pulling this off?”
67. “What I notice about men, all men, is that their order is me, my family, God is in there somewhere, but me is first.”
68. “They never hurried a discussion for the sake of convenience.”
69. “Promotion Does not Change you, it Reveals who you are”
70. “Work hard, laugh often, and keep my word”
71. “Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
72. “It hurt me sometimes to think that he did.”
73. “Instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed.”
74. “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.”
75. “Success isn’t about how much money you make. It’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”
2018 saw the publication of Becoming, Obama’s autobiography. In November 2019, 11.5 million copies had been sold. On May 6, 2020, Netflix released the documentary Becoming, which follows Obama’s book tour to promote the memoir.
Additional Read: Michelle Obama: American first lady