Barack Obama

“ As you go on in life, cultivating this quality of empathy will become harder, not easier. There's no community service requirement in the real world; no one forcing you to care. You'll be free to live in neighborhoods with people who are exactly like yourself, and send your kids to the same schools, and narrow your concerns to what's going in your own little circle.
Not only that - we live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained. ”

“ The class of 1932 would look out a nation in mired in depression; a nation ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. They would hear a man who could not lift himself from his wheelchair lift a nation by telling us that it was only fear itself standing in our way. ”

“ There was a sense of unity born from the rubble of those buildings - young people signing up to serve; political leaders of both parties working together; people asking new questions about our world, hungry for the answers. ”

“ We sent young Americans to fight a war without asking anyone back home to sacrifice their time or their tax cut. We argue about the inconsequential, and caricature our opponents to score cheap political points. ”

“ The world doesn't just revolve around you. There's a lot of talk in this country about the federal deficit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy deficit - the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us - the child who's hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room. ”

“ I often think about the young Americans - teenagers and college kids not much older than you - from all over the country, watching the Civil Rights Movement unfold before them on their television sets. ”

“ An America that's about not just each of us, but all of us. An America that takes great risks in the face of greater odds. An America that, above all, perseveres.
Over one hundred and fifty classes have sat where you sit today, some in good times, others in bad. ”

“ They will tell you that the Americans who sleep in the streets and beg for food got there because they're all lazy or weak of spirit. That the inner-city children who are trapped in dilapidated schools can't learn and won't learn and so we should just give up on them entirely. That the innocent people being slaughtered and expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else's problem to take care of. ”

“ We need new strategies to fight the war on terror. In a world where terrorists can hide and blend into any city on the planet, we can't just believe - as Bill Clinton says - that we can kill or jail every single one of our enemies. ”

“ The class of 1960 would find themselves at the beginning of a decade where social and racial strife threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the nation. They would hear a young President urge them to ask what they could do for their country. ”

“ I rebelled, angry in the way that many young men in general, and young black man in particular, are angry, thinking that responsibility and hard work were old-fashioned conventions that didn't apply to me. ”

“ The class of 1860 would find their country torn apart by civil war in less than a year. Many of them would listen to their President tell them that a house divided cannot stand, and they would answer the call to save a union and free a people. ”

“ Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it's not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. ”

“ It's because you have an obligation to yourself. Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. And because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential - and become full-grown.
The second lesson I learned after college, when I had this crazy idea that I wanted to be a community organizer and work in low-income neighborhoods. ”

“ Now that I have become a man, I have put away childish things."
I bring this up because there's an assumption in rites of passage like this that growing up is just a function of age; that becoming an adult is an inevitable and natural progression. ”