Rowling's Harvard Speech
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 sets 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 government,
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 with 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 change the 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 to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble,
people who have been kind enough 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 tomorrow,
I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine,
you remember those of Seneca,
another of those old 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:
not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.