The former First Lady has been busy since leaving the White House. In 2018, she gave talks and signings around the world in support of her best-selling memoir, Becoming, which offered an intimate glimpse into her childhood, her career, her marriage and her ongoing charity work. She and former President Barack Obama also launched their own production company, Higher Ground Productions, and signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to produce shows and films that will explore a variety of social topics, ranging from racial inequality to the disability rights movement. Obama is clearly still an inspiring role model to her many fans, and in honor of her upcoming birthday, we’re looking back at some of her best quotes on hope, hard work and what it means to be an American.
Michelle Obama Quotes
- “You cannot take your freedoms for granted. Just like generations who have come before you, you have to do your part to preserve and protect those freedoms…you need to be preparing yourself to add your voice to our national conversation. You need to prepare yourself to be informed and engaged as a citizen, to serve and to lead, to stand up for our proud American values and to honor them in your daily lives.”
- “If we want maturity, we have to be mature. If we want a nation that feels hopeful, then we have to speak in hopeful terms…We have to model what we want.”—Interview with Oprah Winfrey in Dec. 2017
- “I want our young people to know that they matter, that they belong. So don’t be afraid. You hear me, young people? Don’t be afraid. Be focused. Be determined. Be hopeful. Be empowered. Empower yourself with a good education. Then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise. Lead by example with hope; never fear.”
- “We have bumps in the road. We have ups and downs but I want our kids to move forward—I don’t care where they come from—with strength and with hope.”—Interview on The Tonight Show in Jan. 2017
- “Plenty of folks—including me and my husband—started out with very little. But with a good education and a lot of hard work, anything is possible.”
- “Let us not forget: I didn’t just wake up First Lady…I mean, I went to law school, I practiced law, I worked for the city, I ran a nonprofit (and) I was an executive at a hospital. I’ve been in the world. I’ve worked in every sector, and you don’t do that without coming up against some stuff. You know, having your feelings hurt, having people say things about you that aren’t true. … Life hits you, so over the course of living, you learn how to protect yourself in it. You learn to take in what you need and get rid of the stuff that’s clearly not true."—Interview with Oprah Winfrey in Dec. 2017
- “We’re so afraid of each other. . . Color, wealth, these things that don’t really matter still play too much of a role in how we see one another. And it’s sad, because the thing that least defines us is the color of our skin.”—Interview with Oprah Winfrey in Dec. 2017
- “I will always be engaged in some way in public service and public life. The minute I left my corporate-law firm to work for the city, I never looked back. I’ve always felt very alive using my gifts and talents to help other people. I sleep better at night. I’m happier.—Vogue, Dec. 2016
- “Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you don’t matter, or like you don’t have a place in our American story—because you do. And you have a right to be exactly who you are.”
- “I’m not done. I’m too young to stop.”—Interview on The Tonight Show in Jan. 2017
- “When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”
- “Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”
- “Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
- “Am I good enough? Yes, I am.”
- “Men who are truly role models don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful.”
- “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s the power of using your voice.”
- “Instead of letting your hardships and failures discourage or exhaust you, let them inspire you. Let them make you even hungrier to succeed.”
- “There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.”
- “Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s a vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
- “Don’t ever make decisions based on fear. Make decisions based on hope and possibility. Make decisions based on what should happen, not what shouldn’t.”
- “I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values—and follow my own moral compass—then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.”
- “Walk away from friendships that make you feel small and insecure, and seek out people who inspire you and support you.”
- “You may not always have a comfortable life. And you will not always be able to solve all the world’s problems at once. But don’t ever underestimate the impact you can have, because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.”
- “The one way to get me to work my hardest was to doubt me.”
- “Success isn’t about how much money you make, it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.”
- “Just do what works for you because there will always be someone who thinks differently.”
- “Reach for partners that make you better. Do not bring people into your life who weigh you down. Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don’t hurt.”
- “Let’s just be clear, you don’t want to be with a boy who’s too stupid to know and appreciate a smart young lady.”
- “There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.”
- “You don’t have to be somebody different to be important. You are important in your own right.”
- “Every girl, no matter where she lives, deserves the opportunity to develop the promise inside of her.”
- “No country can ever truly flourish if it stifles the potential of its women and deprives itself of the contributions of half its citizens.”
- “Being President doesn’t change who you are—it reveals who you are.”
- “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.”
- “With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents, are their most important role models.”
- “That whole ‘so you can have it all.’ Nope, not at the same time. That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that s–t doesn’t work all the time.”
- “Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
- “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”
- “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”
- “Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”
- “For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others.”
- “Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses… swapped back and forth and over again.”
- “One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.”
- “Women endure entire lifetimes of these indignities—in the form of catcalls, groping, assault, oppression. These things injure us. They sap our strength. Some of the cuts are so small they’re barely visible. Others are huge and gaping, leaving scars that never heal. Either way, they accumulate. We carry them everywhere, to and from school and work, at home while raising our children, at our places of worship, anytime we try to advance.”
- “We should always have three friends in our lives-one who walks ahead who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we’ve cleared the way.”
- “Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t “bad kids.” They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.”
- “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.”
- “I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”
- “It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?”
- “In life, you control what you can.”
- “Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.”
- “Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
- “When it came to the home-for-dinner dilemma, I installed new boundaries, ones that worked better for me and the girls. We made our schedule and stuck to it. …It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them ever to believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”
- “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?”
- “Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us.”
- “Because people often ask, I’ll say it here directly: I have no intention of running for office, ever. I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last ten years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastiness—the tribal segregation of red and blue, this idea that we’re supposed to choose one side and stick to it, unable to listen and compromise, or sometimes even to be civil.”
- “I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where an education can take you far. I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”
- “The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.”
- “What I knew from working in professional environments—from recruiting new lawyers for Sidley & Austin to hiring staff at the White House—is that sameness breeds more sameness, until you make a thoughtful effort to counteract it.”
- “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.”
- “It’s a sensation I’ve come to love as I’ve traveled more, the way a new place signals itself instantly and without pretense. The air has a different weight from what you’re used to; it carries smells you can’t quite identify, a faint whiff of wood smoke or diesel fuel, maybe, or the sweetness of something blooming in the trees. The same sun comes up, but looking slightly different from what you know.”
- “Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ’to do’ list.”
- “No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.”
- “Kids wake up each day believing in the goodness of things, in the magic of what might be. They’re uncynical, believers at their core. We owe it to them to stay strong and keep working to create a more fair and humane world. For them, we need to remain both tough and hopeful, to acknowledge that there’s more growing to be done.”
- “You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.”
- “Grief and resilience live together.”
- “Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond; that you do what you say you’re going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don’t know them and even if you don’t agree with them.”
- “I knew from my own life experience that when someone shows genuine interest in your learning and development, even if only for ten minutes in a busy day, it matters. It matters especially for women, for minorities, for anyone society is quick to overlook.”
- “Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an ‘angry black woman.’ I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them the most—is it ‘angry’ or ‘black’ or ‘woman’?”
- “The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person.”
- “My mother maintained the sort of parental mindset that I now recognize as brilliant and nearly impossible to emulate - kind of unflappable Zen neutrality… She wasn’t quick to judge and she wasn’t quick to meddle. Instead, she monitored our moods and bore benevolent witness to whatever travails or triumphs a day might bring… When we’d done something great, we received just enough praise to know she was happy with us, but never so much that it became the reason we did what we did.”
- “Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”
- “I was determined to be someone who told the truth, using my voice to lift up the voiceless when I could, and to not disappear on people in need.”
- “I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.”
- “I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.” Michelle Obama is the queen of uplifting quotes, but if you need more, we have 100 quotes that will keep you positive.
