Stephen Colbert concluded his UVA address by connecting the graduates' challenge to the vision of their university's founder, Thomas Jefferson. Paraphrasing Robert Bolt, he argued that society's understanding of any individual is fundamentally limited — it can only think with that person's own brains. The implication was liberating: if society can't define you, then you're free to define yourself. Colbert then invoked the Declaration of Independence itself, urging graduates to seize their own moment 'when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another.' At a university founded by the author of those words, the call carried special weight. 'You are his intellectual heirs,' Colbert told them — then couldn't resist adding, 'In fact, some of you may be his actual heirs. We're still testing the DNA.'