Michelle Obama

I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase

I’ve been at so many tables with so many folks who are imposters. But shame on us if we sit by and let an imposter talk us down.

We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make… that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.

Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.

Strong men, men who are truly role models, don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful.

The heart of the security agenda is protecting lives – and we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st Century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century.

The first [task of the Pentagon] is to preserve an international system in which what are called American interests – which primarily means business interests, can flourish.

We challenge the narrative that only the individual matters, and the collective is irrelevant, instead we say the common good is the aspiration of all of us.

Despite the ethnic diversity within each nation, the social fabric of the region by and large is one.

We need not stride resolutely towards catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders.

World dictatorship can be established only when the victory of socialism has been achieved in certain countries or groups of countries … [and] when these federation of republics have finally grown into a world union of Soviet Socialist Republics uniting the whole of mankind under the hegemony of the international proletariat organized as a state.

I may find Saddam Hussein’s regime abhorrent – any normal person would – but the survival of it is in his hands.

Ample work in mainstream political science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their own elected representatives, who listen to different voices – the voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector.

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It’s not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals.

The idea of neutral objectivity is at best misleading and often fraudulent. We cannot help but approach complex and controversial questions – especially those of human significance – with a definite point of view, with an ax to grind if you like…

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.

We have more people than ever using foodbanks, we have a greater number of people being homeless and many people in housing stress.

The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism capitalism with the gloves off, meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations.

The more intermediaries there are, the more problems there are.