Legacy

We have a responsibility not to be prisoners of history, but to shape history; a responsibility to fill the role of pathfinder.

This is your time. Take it on. Don't be afraid to lean into the wind, love the earth in all of its natural glories and take care of each other.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

Your B.A. does not belong to you alone, just as the earth does not belong to its present tenants alone. Your education was lent to you by women of the past, and you will give some back to living women, and to your daughters seven generations from now.

You have not earned the right to do less than your best.

You can pay back only seldom. But you can always pay forward, and you must pay forward.

Those who discovered and pioneered this land had to have rare qualities of courage and imagination, nor did these qualities stop there. Even the modern-day immigrants have been possessed of courage beyond that of their neighbors — the courage to tear up centuries-old roots and leave their homelands, to come to this land where even the language was strange.

This democracy of ours which sometimes we've treated so lightly, is more than ever a comfortable cloak, so let us not tear it asunder, for no man knows once it is destroyed where or when he will find its protective warmth again.

We must make the dead live. We must make them live in the world's commencement of abiding peace based on justice and charity.

Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days — the greatest days our country has ever lived.

My message comes from millions of women now mostly past and gone. They lived in a single century; they endured, struggled, and suffered, almost unbelievably, in order that you, unborn in their day, might inherit privileges, opportunities and liberties for which they had so prayerfully longed, but were never permitted to know.

Those who work for a great cause receive comforting satisfaction in the knowledge that they will leave the world better than they found it.