《英文励志演讲稿汇总十篇》
英文励志演讲稿十篇
英文励志演讲稿 篇1
five thousand years of glorious civilization, the chinese, the four major inventions in the world bright with china. descendants are all proud of our nation, proud.
we are proud, because china has a long history and splendid culture. five thousand years of glorious history of the chinese nation, settling the essence of eastern and western civilizations, revealing the dawn of human science, the history of civilization in the world with the enduring charm. four great inventions change the face of humanity as a whole, "book of songs" to create a realistic world literature precedent, the romantic poetry of qu yuan to bring the extraordinary imagination of mankind, the prose of qin and han, tang, song, yuan, ming and qing fiction, confucius and mencius doctrine as well as "the art of war", etc., all demonstrate the ancestors of the chinese nation rich emotion and wisdom.
we are proud that vast land of china. nature millions of years, sculpture, constitute a colorful picture, pentium nurtured
generations of descendants of the yellow river, the yangtze river each new year surging surging waves of wisdom, standing proudly on top of everest in the world peak of the chinese nation the symbol of unyielding character, and many countlerivers and lakes, mountains, okawa, cultural landscape, this is not the pride of all chinese people and proud?
however, history does not glow bright sun every day, china had been brilliant, has a catastrophe ordeal. but also created the chinese nation, we are proud of the great indomitable character, casting a strong backbone of china. over the past 50 years, numerous
miracles again in this wonderful land of birth. rapid economic
development, science and technology fruits. bombs and one satellite has heaven, a seat like a rainbow bridge acrothe yangtze river. three gorges project, the qinghai-tibet railway, hong kong and macao's return, china's accession to wto; test new varieties of hybrid rice succeof the world's agricultural science and technology research to fill gaps in the field, all these all reflect the great vitality and cohesion of china, fully demonstrating its great and brilliant
achievements, should we not be proud of these achievements, and proud of it? decades of good governance, top to bottom search of several years, our country has stood in the east, self-reliance among the nations in the world!
we are the most dynamic young people, like the morning eight or nine o'clock the sun, the hope of the chinese nation. the world is our 21st century is our century! let us work hard seeking knowledge, devote themselves to study culture, to master skills, work together to create our nation a more brilliant tomorrow!
英文励志演讲稿 篇2
Dear：
as you slowly open your eyes,look around,notice where the light comes into your room;listen carefully,see if there are new sounds you can recognize;feel with your body and spirit,and see if you can sense the freshness in the air.
yes,yes,yes,it’s a new day,it’s a different day,and it’s a bright day!and most importantly,it is a new beginning for your life,a beginning where you are going to make new desicisions,take new actions,make new friends,and take your life to a totally unprecedented level!
in your mind’s eye,you can see clearly the things you want to have,the paces you intend to go,the relationships you desire to develop,and the positions you aspire to reach.
you can hear your laughters of joy and happiness on the day when everything happens as you dream.
you can see the smiles on the people around you when the magic moment strikes.
you can feel your face is getting red,your heart is beating fast,and your blood is rushing all over your body,to every single corner of your being!
you know all this is real as long as you are confident,passionate and committed!and you are confident,you are confident,passionate and committed!
you will no longer fear making new sounds,showing new facial expressions,using your body in new ways,approaching new people,and asking new questions.
you will live every single day of your life with absolute passion,and you will show your passion through the words you speak and the actions you take.
you will focus all your time and effort on the most important goals of your life.you will never succumb to challenges of hardships.
you will never waver in your pursuit of excellence.after all,you are the best,and you deserve the best!
as you coach and friend,i can assure you the door to all the best things in the world will open to you,but the key to that door is in your hand.you must do your part,you must faithfully follow the plans you make and take the actions you plan,you must never quit,you must never fear.i know you must do it,you can do it,you will do it,and you will succeed!now stand firm and tall,make a fist,get excited,and yell it out:
i must do it!i can do it!i will do it!i will succeed!
英文励志演讲稿 篇3
now please allow me to introduce myself to you .my name is wangjia and imajored in traffic engineering .baoji is my hometown it is verybeautiful. and the people are very friendly.
as we all knowen thingking is easy acting is difficult and to putone's thoughts into actions is the most difficult thing in the world.
so if we want to learn english well ,we must practice reading englisheveryday ,acturally practicing repeatly is the best way to succeed.whenyou speak ,don't care how poorly or how well you speak just care aboutcatching the chance to speak ,enjoy losing face or just forget your facebecause the more you speak the better your english will become,neverafraid ofmaking mistakes because the more mistakes you make the more progress you will make.as a man living in the world ,we must try our best to makeeach day our masterpiece and don't let our parents down ,don't ever letour country down ,most importantly don't let ourself down.
yesterday is a memory tommorrow is a dream so live for todayjust do it right now.i believe if you can dream it you can make it ,ifyou do you will win if you don't you won't.believe in youself trustyouself try your best. don't give up ,never give in, never lose hope ,never say impossible .the success is coming ! thank you !
英文励志演讲稿 篇4
Dear teacher, dear classmates：
Good morning !
Someone said “we are reading the first verse of the first chapter of a book, whose pages are infinite”. I don't know who wrote these words, but I've always liked them as a reminder that the future can be anything we want it to be. We are all in the position of the farmers. If we plant a good seed ,we reap a good harvest. If we plant nothing at all, we harvest nothing at all.
We are young. “How to spend the youth?” It is a meaningful question. To answer it, first I have to ask “what do you understand by the word youth?” Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind. It's not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips or supple knees. It's the matter of the will. It's the freshness of the deep spring of life.
A poet said “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour. Several days ago, I had a chance to listen to a lecture. I learnt a lot there. I'd like to share it with all of you. Let's show our right palms. We can see three lines that show how our love.career and life is. I have a short line of life. What about yours? I wondered whether we could see our future in this way. Well, let's make a fist. Where is our future? Where is our love, career, and life? Tell me.Yeah, it is in our hands. It is held in ourselves.
We all want the future to be better than the past. But the future can go better itself. Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened. From the past, we've learnt that the life is tough, but we are tougher. We've learnt that we can't choose how we feel, but we can choose what about it. Failure doesn't mean you don't have it, it does mean you should do it in a different way. Failure doesn't mean you should give up, it does mean you must try harder.
As what I said at the beginning, “we are reading the first verse of the first chapter of a book, whose pages are infinite”. The past has gone. Nothing we do will change it. But the future is in front of us. Believe that what we give to the world, the world will give to us. And from today on, let's be the owners of ourselves, and speak out “We are the world, we are the future.”
英文励志演讲稿 篇5
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, it is really my honor to sand here and my topic is Chinese Dream. As is known to all, recently Chinese Dream has become a hot topic around our country which is inspired by President Xi ’s Chinese Dream, everyone talked enthusiastically about his understanding of the Chinese Dream. We all believe that this dream will come true in the future.
As a contemporary college student, Chinese dream is a word too big to understanding. As for my own dream, I have always wanted to be a teacher. Not only because teachers can help students know more about the world, but also because they are doing a respectable job. Teachers can also help people to live a better life with their professional knowledge.
Our new president said: the Chinese dream is a dream of national strength prosperity and people's happiness. He also expounded his views of realizing our great dream. I always ask myself what I can do for our great Chinese dream. As we all know that the wiser the youths are, the stronger the nation will be. I just want to say I am very tiny but I am indispensable. I believe that as long as all of our university students unite together and perform our own functions and study hard in school and work hard after we graduating from university. We must be able to achieve our great dream, and meanwhile do something for our country.
Forty years ago, when Mr. Martin Luther King fell down, his words “I have a dream” spread across the world. But, you must know that there is not just an English version of it. In the distant East, in the China that has held on for thousands of years, there is also a dream. It belongs to every ordinary Chinese. It is “I have a dream” written in Chinese.
英文励志演讲稿 篇6
斯坦福写给被拒学生：漫漫人生路，大学为何物?
THIS AFTERNOON, my office sent out over 34,000 email notifications to high school seniors who applied Regular Decision and were waiting with anticipation to learn whether they would be invited to spend the next four years at Stanford.
在今天下午，我们的招生办公室向3万4千多名申请我们常规录取的盼望着想在斯坦福度过自己四年大学生涯的高中学生发出了邮件。
Even though I have been in the admission field for over 30 years, I still feel quite a bit of pain at the end of this week (as I do each year) about the many exceptional youths who were not offered a space in the class. I also expect that in the following weeks I will hear from parents who are understandably distraught that their sons and daughters with top high school class rankings, very high SAT scores and some truly impressive extracurricular accomplishments were denied entry.
即便我已经负责招生工作长达30年之久，在这个周末，我依然为那些没能如愿以偿拿到offer的年轻人而感到遗憾。同时，我也能预见到很多家长会因为自己的孩子有着十分优异的教育背景，很高的SAT成绩但最终被斯坦福拒绝而感到心烦意乱。
Clearly, I believe that a Stanford education is wonderful, but my experience suggests it’s often parents who are more upset about our admission decisions than the kids. I can relate to their concerns: I found myself getting jittery as my own daughter waited for her college application decisions. But given that today’s teens already have enough pressure in their lives, I wish to impart three credos to these parents.
我一直相信斯坦福的教育水平是无与伦比的。但我的'经验告诉我，当这些孩子被斯坦福拒绝的时候，他们家长会比他们更感到沮丧。我能体会到这些家长的感受。当我的女儿在等待大学的录取决定时，我也曾经紧张和不安。现今的孩子们已经承受了太多的压力，在这里，我想与所有家长分享三条理念
First, it's all relative. While the number admitted into the undergraduate class has remained unchanged for years, Stanford, like many of its peer schools, has had a record number of total applicants – more than 42,000. Regardless of arguments over whether too much preference is given to one category over another, thousands of students are going to be turned away, and there is no doubt that the vast majority of them could have met the demands of a Stanford education. We could, for instance, have filled incoming classes four or five times over with applicants who achieved grade point averages of 4.0 or greater.
首先，一切都是相对的。虽然每年录取的本科生人数已经保持不变数年之久，斯坦福像他同一级别的其他学校一样，每年会收到超过420xx份申请。先不管录取时对申请人资质的侧重和倾向问题，每年都会有数千学生会被无情的拒绝掉。毫无疑问的是，这些被拒掉的学生中，绝大多数是符合斯坦福的申请要求的。实际上，有着GPA4.0的申请者的数量是我们实际录取人数四到五倍。
I wish there were a formula to explain who is accepted and who isn’t, but the decision-making is as much art as it is science. Each class is a symphony with its own distinct composition and sound; the final roster is an effort to create harmony, and that means that some extraordinary bass players don’t get a chair. What’s more, even among my staff there are legitimate differences about applicants. The bottom line: The world is not going to judge anyone negatively because they didn’t get into Stanford or one of our peer institutions.
英文励志演讲稿 篇7
as you slowly open your eyes,look around,notice where the light comes into your room;listen carefully,see if there are new sounds you can recognize;feel with your body and spirit,and see if you can sense the freshness in the air.
yes,yes,yes,it’s a new day,it’s a different day,and it’s a bright day!and most importantly,it is a new beginning for your life,a beginning where you are going to make new desicisions,take new actions,make new friends,and take your life to a totally unprecedented level!
in your mind’s eye,you can see clearly the things you want to have,the paces you intend to go,the relationships you desire to develop,and the positions you aspire to reach.
you can hear your laughters of joy and happiness on the day when everything happens as you dream.
you can see the smiles on the people around you when the magic moment strikes.
you can feel your face is getting red,your heart is beating fast,and your blood is rushing all over your body,to every single corner of your being!
you know all this is real as long as you are confident,passionate and committed!and you are confident,you are confident,passionate and committed!
you will no longer fear making new sounds,showing new facial expressions,using your body in new ways,approaching new people,and asking new questions.
you will live every single day of your life with absolute passion,and you will show your passion through the words you speak and the actions you take.
you will focus all your time and effort on the most important goals of your will never succumb to challenges of hardships.
you will never waver in your pursuit of r all,you are the best,and you deserve the best!
as you coach and friend,i can assure you the door to all the best things in the world will open to you,but the key to that door is in your must do your part,you must faithfully follow the plans you make and take the actions you plan,you must never quit,you must never fear.i know you must do it,you can do it,you will do it,and you will succeed!now stand firm and tall,make a fist,get excited,and yell it out:
i must do it!i can do it!i will do it!i will succeed!
英文励志演讲稿 篇8
As you slowly open your eyes, look around, notice(注意) where the light comes into your room; listen carefully(仔细的，小心的。谨慎的), see if there are new sounds you can recognize(认识。认出，辨认); feel with your body and spirit, and see if you can sense the freshness(新鲜的) in the air.(bfanwen.com)
Yes, yes, yes, it's a new day, it's a different day, and it's bright (明亮的，发亮的，辉煌的，阳光灿烂的)day! And most importantly, it's a new beginning for your life, a beginning where you are going to make new decisions(决定), take new actions, make new friends, and take your life
to a totally unprecedented(空前的) level(水平，层次，级别).
In your mind's(n.心，精神，心力，知，智力，智慧;心胸，头脑，人;愿望，目的，意向，意志，决心，见解，意见;记忆，记性，记忆力，回想vi.介意;注意vt.专心于;介意;愿意做;照顾) eye, you can see clearly(清晰的，明白的)， the things you want to have, the paces(步度，步速，步调) you intend (想要，打算，计划)to go, the relationships you desire (愿望，欲望，情欲，要求，请求)to develop, and the positions(位置，方位。地位，职务。状况) you aspire(励志)to reach.
You can hear your laughters of joy(欢乐，快乐) and happiness on the day when everything happens as you dream. You can see the smiles on the people around you when the magic(魔法，也指神奇的力量，魔力，魅力) moment strikes(攻击，击中). You can feel your face is getting red, your heart is beating fast, and your blood is rushing(冲，奔涌) all over your body, to every single(单一的，个别的) corner(角落，转折点) of your being!
You know all this is real as long as you are confident(确定的，肯定的，有信心的), passionate (热情的，感情强烈的，激昂的)and committed!(效忠的) And you are confident, you are passionate, you are committed!
You will no longer fear making new sounds, showing new facial(面部的，面部用的，美容用的)expressions(表达，陈述，体现，表情), using your body in new ways, approaching new people, and asking new questions.
You will live every single(单一的，个别的)day of your life with absolute(绝对的，专制独裁的，完全的) passion, and you will show your
passion through the words you speak and the actions you take.
You will focus all your time and effort(努力，艰难的尝试，努力的成果，成就) on the most important goals of your life. You will never succumb(屈服，屈从) to challenges of hardships(苦难，困苦，苦事，苦因).
You will never waver(动摇) in your pursuit(追赶，追逐，追求) of excellence(优秀，杰出，卓越). After all, you are the best, and you deserve
the best!
As your coach(私人教练，指导教师) and friend, I can assure(使确信，使放心，向。。。保证) you the door to all the best things in the world will open to you, but the key to that door is in your hand. You must do your part(部分，本分，职责). You must faithfully(忠诚的) follow the plans you make and take the actions you plan; you must never quit(离开，退出，停止，放弃) and you must never fear. I know you must do it, you can do it, you will do it, and you will succeed! Now stand firm and
tall, make a fist, get excited, and yell it out:
I must do it! I can do it! I will do it! I will succeed!
I must do it! I can do it! I will do it! I will succeed!
I must do it! I can do it! I will do it! I will succeed!
英文励志演讲稿 篇9
热爱生活
However mean your life is, meet it and live it;
无论你的生活如何卑微，都要正视它，并活下去;
do not shun it and call it hard names.
不要躲避它，也不要恶语相加。
It is not so bad as you are.
你的生活不像你本人那么糟糕。
It looks poorest when you are richest.
你最富有的时候，你的生活看上去倒似最贫穷。
The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise.
吹毛求疵的'人即便在天堂也能挑出瑕疵。
Love your life, poor as it is.
你要热爱你的生活，尽管生活一贫如洗。
You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours,even in a poorhouse.
即使身处济贫院，你也可能享受一段愉快、兴奋、美妙的时光。
The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's abode;
西斜的落日映照在济贫院窗户上的余晖，与照射在富贵人家豪宅上的一样光芒万丈;
the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.
门前的积雪同在早春消融。
I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there,and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.
在我看来，一个心态平和的人处事泰然，思想乐观，过着自得其乐的生活，住在济贫院就如同居住在皇宫里一般。
The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives of any.
依我之见，城镇的贫民倒是往往过着最独立不羁的生活。
Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without misgiving.
也许他们十分伟大，对任何事情皆可坦然受之。
Most think that they are above being supported by the town;
大多数人认为他们不屑于接受城镇的施救;
but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable.
但是实际上他们经常使用不诚实的手段来维持自己的生计，这是更为不体面的。
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.
像圣贤一样，如同栽培花园中的花草一般来培养贫困吧。
Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,whether clothes or friends.
犯不着千辛万苦以求获得新东西，无论是衣服还是朋友。
Turn the old; return to them.
返璞，归真。
Things do not change; we change.
万物没有变，是我们在变。
Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.
衣履可鬻,所思必存。
God will see that you do not want society.
上帝会证明，你并不需要社会。
If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days,like a spider,the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts about me.
如果我每天都躲在阁楼一角，像只蜘蛛一样，可只要我的思想指引我，世界于我还是一样的广阔无边。
英文励志演讲稿 篇10
It is such an honor and pleasure for me to be back at Yale, especially on the occasion of the 300th anniversary. I have had so many memories of my time here, and as Nick was speaking I thought about how I ended up at Yale Law School. And it tells a little bit about how much progress we’ve made.
What I think most about when I think of Yale is not just the politically charged atmosphere and not even just the superb legal education that I received. It was at Yale that I began work that has been at the core of what I have cared about ever since. I began working with New Haven legal services representing children. And I studied child development, abuse and neglect at the Yale New Haven Hospital and the Child Study Center. I was lucky enough to receive a civil rights internship with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund, where I went to work after I graduated. Those experiences fueled in me a passion to work for the benefit of children, particularly the most vulnerable.
Now, looking back, there is no way that I could have predicted what path my life would have taken. I didn’t sit around the law school, saying, well, you know, I think I’ll graduate and then I’ll go to work at the Children’s Defense Fund, and then the impeachment inquiry, and Nixon retired or resigns, I’ll go to Arkansas. I didn’t think like that. I was taking each day at a time.名人励志演讲稿But, I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve always had an idea in my mind about what I thought was important and what gave my life meaning and purpose. A set of values and beliefs that have helped me navigate the shoals, the sometimes very treacherous sea, to illuminate my own true desires, despite that others say about what l should care about and believe in. A passion to succeed at what l thought was important and children have always provided that lone star, that guiding light. Because l have that absolute conviction that every child, especially in this, the most blessed of nations that has ever existed on the face of earth, that every child deserves the opportunity to live up to his or her God-given potential.
But you know that belief and conviction-it may make for a personal mission statement, but standing alone, not translated into action, it means very little to anyone else, particularly to those for whom you have those concerns.
When I was thinking about running for the United States Senate-which was such an enormous decision to make, one I never could have dreamed that I would have been making when I was
here on campus-I visited a school in New York City and I met a young woman, who was a star athlete.
I was there because of Billy Jean King promoting an HBO special about women in sports called “Dare to compete.” It was about Title IX and how we finally, thanks to government action, provided opportunities to girls and women in sports.
And although I played not very well at intramural sports, I have always been a strong supporter of women in sports. And I was introduced by this young woman, and as I went to shake her hand she obviously had been reading the newspapers about people saying I should or shouldn’t run for the Senate. And I was congratulating her on the speech she had just made and she held onto my hand and she said, “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.”
I took that to heart because it is hard to compete sometimes, especially in public ways, when your failures are there for everyone to see and you don’t know what is going to happen from one day to the next. And yet so much of life, whether we like to accept it or not, is competing with ourselves to be the best we can be, being involved in classes or professions or just life, where we know we are competing with others.
I took her advice and I did compete because I chose to do so. And the biggest choices that you’ll face in your life will be yours alone to make. I’m sure you’ll receive good advice. You’re got a great education to go back and reflect about what is right for you, but you eventually will have to choose and I hope that you will dare to compete. And by that I don’t mean the kind of cutthroat competition that is too often characterized by what is driving America today. I mean the small voice inside you that says to you, you can do it, you can take this risk, you can take this next step.
And it doesn’t mean that once having made that choice you will always succeed. In fact, you won’t. There are setbacks and you will experience difficult disappointments. You will be slowed down and sometimes the breath will just be knocked out of you. But if you carry with you the values and beliefs that you can make a difference in your own life, first and foremost, and then in the lives of others. You can get back up, you can keep going.
But it is also important, as I have found, not to take yourself too seriously, because after all, every one of us here today, none of us is deserving of full credit. I think every day of the blessings my birth gave me without any doing of my own. I chose neither my family nor my country, but they as much as anything I’ve ever done, determined my course.
You compare my or your circumstances with those of the majority of people who’ve ever lived or who are living right now, they too often are born knowing too well what their futures will be. They lack the freedom to choose their life’s path. They’re imprisoned by circumstances of poverty and ignorance, bigotry, disease, hunger, oppression and war.
So, dare to compete, yes, but maybe even more difficult, dare to care. Dare to care about people who need our help to succeed and fulfill their own lives. There are so many out there and
sometimes all it takes is the simplest of gestures or helping hands and many of you understand that already. I know that the numbers of graduates in the last 20 years have worked in community organizations, have tutored, have committed themselves to religious activities.
You have been there trying to serve because you have believed both that it was the right thing to do and because it gave something back to you. You have dared to care.
Well, dare to care to fight for equal justice for all, for equal pay for women, against hate crimes and bigotry. Dare to care about public schools without qualified teachers or adequate resources. Dare to care about protecting our environment. Dare to care about the 10 million children in our country who lack health insurance. Dare to care about the one and a half million children who have a parent in jail. The seven million people who suffer from HIV/AIDS. And thank you for caring enough to demand that our nation do more to help those that are suffering throughout this world with HIV/AIDS, to prevent this pandemic from spreading even further.
And I’ll also add, dare enough to care about our political process. You know, as I go and speak with students I’m impressed so much, not only in formal settings, on campuses, but with my daughter and her friends, about how much you care, about how willing you are to volunteer and serve. You may have missed the last wave of the revolution, but you’ve understood that the dot.community revolution is there for you every single day. And you’ve been willing to be part of remarking lives in our community.
And yet, there is a real resistance, a turning away from the political process. I hope that some of you will be public servants and will even run for office yourself, not to win a position to make and impression on your friends at your 20th reunion, but because you understand how important it is for each of us as citizens to make a commitment to our democracy.
Your generation, the first one born after the social upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s, in the midst of the technological advances of the 80’s and 90’s, are inheriting an economy, a society and a government that has yet to understand fully, or even come to grips with, our rapidly changing world.
And so bring your values and experiences and insights into politics. Dare to help make, not just a difference in politics, but create a different politics. Some have called you the generation of choice. You’ve been raised with multiple choice tests, multiple channels, multiple websites and multiple lifestyles. You’ve grown up choosing among alternatives that were either not imagined, created or available to people in prior generations.
You’ve been invested with far more personal power to customize your life, to make more free choices about how to live than was ever thought possible. And I think as I look at all the surveys and research that is done, your choices reflect not only freedom, but personal responsibility.
The social indicators, not the headlines, the social indicators tell a positive story: drug use and cheating and arrests being down, been pregnancy and suicides, drunk driving deaths being down.
Community service and religious involvement being up. But if you look at the area of voting among 18 to 29 year olds, the numbers tell a far more troubling tale. Many of you I know believe that service and community volunteerism is a better way of solving the issues facing our country than political engagement, because you believe-choose one of the following multiples or choose them all-government either can’t understand or won’t make the right choices because of political pressures, inefficiency, incompetence or big money influence.
Well, I admit there is enough truth in that critique to justify feeling disconnected and alienated. But at bottom, that’s a personal cop-out and a national peril. Political conditions maximize the conditions for individual opportunity and responsibility as well as community. Americorps and the Peace Corps exist because of political decisions. Our air, water, land and food will be clean and safe because of political choices. Our ability to cure disease or log onto the Internet have been advanced because of politically determined investments. Ethnic cleansing in Kosovo ended because of political leadership. Your parents and grandparents traveled here by means of government built and subsidized transportation systems. Many used GI Bills or government loans, as I did, to attend college.
Now, I could, as you might guess, go on and on, but the point is to remind us all that government is us and each generation has to stake its claim. And, as stakeholders, you will have to decide whether or not to make the choice to participate. It is hard and it is, bringing change in a democracy, particularly now. There’s so much about our modern times that conspire to lower our sights, to weaken our vision-as individuals and communities and even nations.
It is not the vast conspiracy you may have heard about; rather it’s a silent conspiracy of cynicism and indifference and alienation that we see every day, in our popular culture and in our prodigious consumerism.
But as many have said before and as Vaclav Havel has said to memorably, “It cannot suffice just to invent new machines, new regulations and new institutions. It is necessary to understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this Earth and of our deeds.” And I think we are called on to reject, in this time of blessings that we enjoy, those who will tear us apart and tear us down and instead to liberate our God-given spirit, by being willing to dare to dream of a better world.
During my campaign, when times were tough and days were long I used to think about the example of Harriet Tubman, a heroic New Yorker, a 19th century Moses, who risked her life to bring hundreds of slaves to freedom. She would say to those who she gathered up in the South where she kept going back year after year from the safety of Auburn, New York, that no matter what happens, they had to keep going. If they heard shouts behind them, they had to keep going. If they heard gunfire or dogs, they had to keep going to freedom. Well, those aren’t the risks we face. It is more the silence and apathy and indifference that dogs our heels.
Thirty-two years ago, I spoke at my own graduation from Wellesley, where I did call on my fellow classmates to reject the notion of limitations on our ability to effect change and instead to
embrace the idea that the goal of education should be human liberation and the freedom to practice with all the skill of our being the art of making possible.
For after all, our fate is to be free. To choose competition over apathy, caring over indifference, vision over myopia, and love over hate.
Just as this is a special time in your lives, it is for me as well because my daughter will be graduating in four weeks, graduating also from a wonderful place with a great education and beginning a new life. And as I think about all the parents and grandparents who are out there, I have a sense of what their feeling. Their hearts are leaping with joy, but it’s hard to keep tears in check because the presence of our children at a time and place such as this is really a fulfillment of our own American dreams. Well, I applaud you and all of your love, commitment and hard work, just as I applaud your daughters and sons for theirs.
And I leave these graduates with the same message I hope to leave with my graduate. Dare to compete. Dare to care. Dare to dream. Dare to love. Practice the art of making possible. And no matter what happens, even if you hear shouts behind, keep going.
Thank you and God bless you all.