Michelle Obama

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

The only other person who has a clue about what this is, the good, the bad, is your partner.

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.

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

What truly made me fall in love with Barack Obama was his character.

[on the 2016 election] When the most qualified person running was a woman, and look what we did instead, I mean that says something about where we are. That’s what we have to explore, because if we as women are still suspicious of one another, if we still have this crazy, crazy bar for each other that we don’t have for men… if we’re not comfortable with the notion that a woman could be our president compared to… what, then we have to have those conversations with ourselves as women.

For profit higher education is today a booming industry feeding on the student loans handed out to the desperate.

I don’t care what their [Guns N’ Roses] record is. If you need a blood donor and the only person who can give you a transfusion is Hitler, you take the blood.

The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things – the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.

I would like to be a scholar in whatever I do, a scholar is never finished, he is always seeking and I am always seeking.

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past – whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

But before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of Education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of Society nearer to the higher. The Education of a Nation, instead of being confined to a few schools & Universities, for the instruction of the few, must become the National Care and expence, for the information of the Many.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the highest return.

By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good paying job.

It is a truism that education is no longer a luxury. Education in this day and age is a necessity.