Michelle Obama

Tweeting and social media – that is a powerful weapon that we just hand over to little kids. You know, a ten-year-old. Yo, tell it like it is. And it’s like, no you don’t. You need to think and spell it right and have good grammar.

You have to get that mom face right, like, ‘Oh, did that happen? Tell me more.’ Trying not to react so you get the good information. I tried to tell Sasha and Malia, ‘Do not go to other 14-year-olds for information, ’cause all you all are dumb. Talk to me.’ It’s like, ‘All of you are dumb. You know nothing. Love you!’ So, let’s just talk about it. Don’t ask Olivia what she thinks about sex. She doesn’t know!

As I reminded my girls, these aren’t problems. These are very high class problems. Because of where Barack and I come from, we just couldn’t sympathize with their… It was like, ‘Girl, you live in the White House. You do not get to complain about this.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way!

It was sort of important for us not to deal with a specific policy change, or a specific sort of approach, but to deal with cultural change.

When I hear people say, ‘you run,’ it’s part of the problem. We still didn’t get ‘yes we can’ right. It’s not ‘yes you can,’ it’s ‘yes we can.’ And until we get that right, it doesn’t matter who runs.

We won the Electoral College by a lot: 306 to 223, I believe. And that was a well-fought — that was a well-fought battle. We did a great job.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the ‘engineering of consent’ by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

I don’t blame China, I blame the incompetence of past Admins for allowing China to take advantage of the U.S. on trade leading up to a point where the U.S. is losing $100’s of billions. How can you blame China for taking advantage of people that had no clue? I would’ve done same!

If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people’s lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.

In our democracy every young person should have an equal opportunity to obtain a higher education, regardless of his station in life or financial means.

…there is definitely a sector of the population that considers themselves threatened by big forces, ranging from the Federal Reserve to the Council on Foreign Relations to big government to who knows what and are calling for guns to protect themselves.

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.

Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

No one should be allowed to violently trample on the law.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

There was a study that was reported in the MIT Technology Review [in Dec 2015] saying that [in the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere] the current average temperature rise is equivalent to moving south about ten meters a day. That’s pretty fast.

Although some people felt Adolf Hitler was bad, he was a great man and a real conqueror whose name would never be forgotten.

Business power is very far from benign and it’s completely unaccountable. It’s a totalitarian system that has an enormous effect on our lives. It’s also the main reason why the government isn’t benign.