My good friends, we are all waiting. We are waiting, if not for the Messiah, as such, we are waiting for the messianic moment. And the messianic moment is what each and every one of us tries to build, meaning a certain area of humanity that links us to all those who are human and, therefore, desperately trying to fight despair as humanly as possible and-I hope-with some measure of success.
There is no script. Live your life. Soak it all in.
Everybody wants you to do good things, but in a small town you pretty much graduate and get married. Mostly you marry, have children and go to their football games.
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.
I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what's going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.
Just remember, you can't climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.
It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy - they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Respect people with less power then you. I don’t care if you’re the most powerful cat in the room, I will judge you on how you treat the least powerful. So there.
Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.
I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA.
Give me but a firm spot on which to stand, and I shall move the earth.
America must always lead on the world stage. If we don't, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership. But U. S. military action cannot be the only - or even primary - component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.
I first became interested in women and religion when I was one of the few women doing graduate work in Religious Studies at Yale University in the late 1960's.
It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.
The morning after my high-school graduation found me up early job hunting. The dream of college I put on the back burner.
It's not what the world holds for you. It's what you bring to it.
