Your success as a family... our success as a nation... depends not on what happens inside the White House, but on what happens inside your house.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

I'm a great believer that the most important years are the sort of early years but the preschool years and then into the first and second grades. If you get a good base in the first and second grade and you can read, you can do anything.

Whatever the era...one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children, they must come first.

You can't tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

I may be the only mother in America who knows exactly what their child is up to all the time.

The state dinner is almost a formula, but you try to make it interesting. You try not to overload it with too many political types. You try to get a cross section.