Talking Points
Conan O’Brien (2011)
“If Harvard, Yale and Princeton are your self-involved, vain, name-dropping older brothers, you are the cool, sexually confident, lacrosse-playing younger sibling who knows how to throw a party and looks good in a down vest.”
Louise Erdrich ’76 (2009)
“No matter what we believe, no matter what our political convictions, ethnicities or religious faiths, we have to get together and steer this thing.”
Sen. Bill Bradley (1987)
“I envy you for things you will see and know that my generation never dreamed of.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1838)
“Thought is all light, and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will flow out of your actions, your manners and your face. It will bring you friendships.”
President Bill Clinton (1995)
“Money without purpose leads to an empty life. Technology without compassion and wisdom and a devotion to truth can lead to nightmares.”
Madeleine Albright (2001)
“I hope you will be doers, not hearers only, and that when required you will indeed dare, as Dartmouth's motto suggests, to be voices crying the truth even in the wilderness.”
Elie Wiesel (2006)
“War is an act of despair; peace, of a song of and for hope.”
Fred Rogers ’50 (2002)
“Deep down, we know that what matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win too.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953)
“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed.”
Robert Frost class of 1896 (1955)
“Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept; fall in with it—and turn it your way.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin (1998)
“The richest and fullest lives attain an inner balance of work, love and play, in equal order.”
Beverly Sills (1985)
“If you are one of those people who like to get into the center of the ring and fight the bull in every sense of the word, I suggest you do it, because you can change the world.”
Robert Reich ’68 (1994)
“At Dartmouth I learned how to learn. You have done the same, and there are few more potent skills.”
Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh (1958)
“I would ask you, first of all, today to begin by examining yourself. Have you ever calmly and rationally and objectively taken stock of yourself? Why you are alive, where you are going and why?”
Tom Brokaw (2005)
“In pursuit of passions, always be young.”
