BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BE BOLD. Keep on reading. And remember when you hear yourself saying you don't have time anymore to read — then you're getting old. That means they got to you, after all.
Susan Sontag
Wellesley College Commencement 1983, 1983
The Story Behind This Quote
Writer and cultural critic Susan Sontag delivered the commencement address at Wellesley College in 1983, offering one of the most intellectually rigorous graduation speeches ever given. She referenced Spenser's 'The Faerie Queen,' where the gates of the Castle of Busyrane bear the inscriptions 'BE BOLD,' 'BE BOLD, BE BOLD,' and finally, 'BE NOT TOO BOLD.' Sontag rejected the counsel of prudence entirely. Instead, she urged graduates to be as imprudent as they dared, to keep reading poetry and novels, to lay off the television, and to recognize that the moment they stopped feeding their minds was the moment they had surrendered to the forces of conformity. It was a rallying cry for intellectual courage from one of America's fiercest public intellectuals.
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