Long

You can't do it alone. As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own.

Take your risks now. As you grow older, you become more fearful and less flexible. And I mean that literally — I hurt my knee on the treadmill this week and it wasn't even on.

Think about not waiting your turn. Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, people you envy. Think about not waiting for a company to call you up.

In every career, your job is to make and tell stories. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection—the people you've helped and who've helped you back.

Fear is cheap. Fear is easy. Fear gets attention. Fear is spread as fast as gossip and is just as glamorous, juicy, and profitable. Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance.

Your career as human beings and as Americans and as graduates of Yale is to stand on the fulcrum between fear and faith—fear at your back, faith in front of you. Which way will you lean? Which way will you move? Move forward. Ever forward.

A good education in the United States of America, one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on this planet, remains a gift for some when it should be a right for all.

Love is today mingled with grief. And yet love grows greater. Create in and through that love. Calm the seas of your anxiety and infuse new life deep into the poisoned wells of culture.

Sign languages in schools for the deaf are not only options but they're the human right of deaf children and students, and it is on par with spoken languages.

The right to access language and language acquisition is a necessary prerequisite for exercising the right to human dignity, freedom of expression, and all other human rights.

These international students are our true hope. They will become our ambassadors of change, the ambassadors of democratic freedoms and the rights for higher education, and they will become our future leaders.

The soft power of science has the potential to reshape global diplomacy—and at significantly lower expense than that needed for use of the hard power of military involvement.