Michelle Obama Quotes

I firmly believe that if your environment works for you and your family, it translates into a better life.

We're the only developed country in the world that doesn't have paid maternity leave. Paternity leave is just as important. Paid family medical leave so that you can take care of a parent, a child, a grandparent, whatever you need to do. I think we're shortsighted when we don't invest in our employees as companies, and as an economy, because we invest in them and they invest back in us.

Quiet time is the key. We have hundreds of thousands of kids around the country meditating through the David Lynch Foundation.

I think the major role of the First Lady is to take care of the President so that he can best serve the people. And not to fail her family, her husband, and children.

You can't make your kids what you want them to be. They are who they are and you have to help them to succeed in the world as best you can.

Our kids grew up here [in the White House]. Some of our best friends have been made here in this place. There have been moments that were highlights for us - that - you know, are going to be hard to duplicate.

I want us to do more to support people who are struggling to balance family and work. I've heard from so many of you about the difficult choices you face and the stresses that you're under. So let's have paid family leave, earned sick days. Let's be sure we have affordable child care and debt-free college.

Children are meant to understand compassion and comfort because they have received compassion and comfort - and this should be in the family setting. A family should be a place where comfort is experienced and understood, so that the people are prepared to give comfort to others.

Women are holding up the world. We're taking care our children and, very often, our parents and sometimes our grandparents.

Aunt May's values and Spiderman's traumas are kind of what's defined him as a young boy and now that he's becoming a young man, she's there to provide that safe place where he can still be a kid if he needs to be, or know that he has a home base as he's going through all these physical changes. So as long as those essentials are there, we can work on finding the character together.

Creating a warm, caring, supportive, encouraging environment is probably the most important thing you can do for your family.

I've spent 30 years, actually maybe a little more, working to help kids and families. And I want to take all that experience to the White House and do that every single day.

My girl and my kid gets the best, always.

What I want for children in our country and around the world is safe, stable and loving homes.

The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.

I believe we need affordable child care. I believe we need flexibility. I believe we need institutional reform and public policy reform.

The White House is such an extraordinary, simple, beautiful place. It's an extraordinary piece of our history, because it is the one thing that binds our country together. We don't have a king obviously, but we have this president, and the fact that almost all of them have lived in the same place, and so much history took place in those rooms. You can't help but feel awe-inspired by being there.

One thing that I've learned from male role models is that they don't hesitate to invest in themselves, with the view that, if I'm healthy and happy, I'm going to be a better support to my spouse and children. And I've found that to be the case: Once my kids were settled, the next thing I did was take care of my own health and sanity. And made sure that I was exercising and felt good about myself. I'd bring that energy to everything else that I did, the career, relationship, on and on and on.

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care.

It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.

I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has.

Fighting for kids and families has been the cause of my life.

No government can love a child, and no policy can substitute for a family's care. But at the same time, government can either support or undermine families as they cope with moral, social and economic stresses of caring for children.

I firmly believe that if you help a woman, then you educate a child, you help the family. Because women are very focused on health care and education and on the family. So if you help a woman, you help the family, you help the village, you help the country. And so empowering women is a very important part of moving, not just women forward, but the economy of the nation forward. Particularly in very substandard nations.

We had all the advantages of being in, you know, the '50s and the '60s, where a one-income household could actually support a family. And mom was around and wanted nothing more than to just, you know, do everything she could for her kids.