Michelle Obama

Our first job in life as women, I think, is to get to know ourselves. And I think a lot of times we don’t do that. We spend our time pleasing, satisfying, looking out into the world to define who we are – listening to the messages, the images, the limited definitions that people have of who we are.

I want someone with the proven strength to persevere, someone who knows this job and takes it seriously, someone who understands that the issues a president faces are not black and white and cannot be boiled down to 140 characters.

The difference between a broken community and a thriving one is the presence of women who are valued.

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

I’m a product of pop culture.

I could have spent eight years doing anything, and at some level, it would have been fine. I could have focused on flowers. I could have focused on decor. I could have focused on entertainment. Because any First Lady, rightfully, gets to define her role. There’s no legislative authority; you’re not elected. And that’s a wonderful gift of freedom.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Play the game for more than you can afford to lose… only then will you learn the game.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.

I believe that every person is born with talent.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Do what you know and perception is converted into character.

Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence.

Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.

Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.