Social Responsibility and Friend

What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters.

For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, throught our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18,in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

that is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives.

In expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008,likely to touch other people's lives?

Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities.

Even your nationality set you apart.

The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower.

The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your govenement, has an impact way beyond your borders.

That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice, if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but the powerless.

If you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change.

We do not need magic to transform our world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already, we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished.

I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21.

The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life.
They are my children's godparents, the people of whom I have been able to turn in times of real  trouble, people who have been kind enought not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.

At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships.

And tomoorow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those Seneca, another of those Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom.

As is a tale, so is life, no how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives, thank you very much.