Top 22 Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes

I like that there are young people being given opportunities to explore and learn and grow and become themselves with a path that is associated with my mother. She would have liked that very much.

Government should exist in order to help fortify the country and make those who are in need better able to meet their own.

We can’t afford to live in isolation, and we need to teach our kids that the things that they do not only matter to others far away but impact others who live far away, and there are ripples of effect.

I absolutely do believe that we need to not be so myopic. We ought to throw open widely the windows on the world in order to learn more about it.

Being told that I looked like I belonged everywhere and to everyone helped me feel my fledgling pride in my own multiracialism.

Government is supposed to lead by example in many cases. Government that’s not particularly caring and is hands-off is not particularly inspiring.

I’m half white, half Asian. I think of myself as hybrid. People usually think I’m Latina when they meet me. That’s what made me learn Spanish.

I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.

I think a lot about our globalized world, our global interconnectedness, and it really saddens me when I see people ‘othering,’ when I see people who are willing to live narrowly.

The rich emotional tapestry of being a mother, becoming a mother, connects you to your own mother. I didn’t realize how much I’d become her. I pass a mirror, and am surprised by how much I look like her.

My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.

The facts are simply that my brother was born in the United States at the Kapiolani Hospital for Women and Children in 1961. His birth certificate has been authenticated by a number of sources.

This is not a family of privilege by any stretch of the imagination. Our family is very low key.

We need to teach our children empathy and care and love and communication and social responsibility in preparation for adulthood.

I ended up very American and very Indonesian and a little bit of a lot of things.

It was as a mother that I needed my mother back, and I needed to conjure her anew and think about what she would have counselled and what she would have given.

We all have a limited amount of good judgment.

My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious.

Barack himself is very much a regular guy, not a silver spoon, incredibly smart, but, you know, he’s a scholarship kid, made good use of the resources that were available to him, worked incredibly hard.

Mom was an academic, so the riches that she had to bestow were of the mind.

You really need to love something or someone in order to work hard enough to be very successful. You have to believe in something and have a certain optimism. Faith and optimism come from love.

My brother loves this country deeply. He has laid down roots, and he has always been incredibly patriotic and committed to this country.