“'Ah, music,' he said, wiping his eyes. 'A magic beyond all we do here!'”

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“Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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“If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice... it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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“We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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“Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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“Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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“failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me... Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.”

from Harvard Commencement address, 2008

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