High-quality early-childhood programs and health coverage have expanded, and the number of mentoring relationships for at-risk youth has risen dramatically. That progress is encouraging, but it’s not evenly distributed.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Man, all lives matter.

When you look at how much we spend on social programs in our country, it separates us from a lot of countries. In our country, if you’re hungry, we’ll feed you. If you’re homeless, we’ll house you. If you’re too poor to be sick, we’ll pay for your doctor. But all of that comes at a cost.

Yes, we’ve still got more work to do. More work to do for every American still in need of a good job or a raise, paid leave or a decent retirement; for every child who needs a sturdier ladder out of poverty or a world-class education; for everyone who has not yet felt the progress of these past seven and a half years.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

India should walk on her own shadow – we must have our own development model.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

Despotism can only exist in darkness, and there are too many lights now in the political firmament to permit it to remain anywhere, as it has heretofore done, almost everywhere.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take ten forward.

There is but one stage for the peasant and the actor.

The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.

There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds?

The assertion that ‚all men are created equal‘ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.

Freedom is not enough.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.

Innovation can only occur where you can breathe free.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.

Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.

Be as polite to the custodian as you are to the chairman of the board.

The belief that the world is getting worse, that we can’t solve extreme poverty and disease, isn’t just mistaken. It is harmful.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Yeah, I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t really speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person.

You know that being an American is more than a matter of where your parents came from. It is a belief that all men are created free and equal and that everyone deserves an even break.

I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.

I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.

I do not like to repeat successes, I like to go on to other things.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

The method of instruction in Scouting is that of creating in the boy the desire to learn for himself.

I’m not focused on the gay and lesbian movement.

I detest racialism, because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man.

To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn’t do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress.

This young century will be liberty’s century.

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free – honorable alike in that we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New, but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

Surely the wake left behind by mankind’s forward march reveals its movement just as clearly as the spray thrown up elsewhere by the prow.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

The American doctor, in my opinion, possesses a combination of conservatism and that other quality which has put the United States in the forefront in almost every department of science – that is, an eagerness to know what it is really all about in order that he may not be the one left behind if there is something to it.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.

The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.