A selection of recent distinguished speakers on the UD campus
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"Your degree from the University of Delaware has prepared you to think, to learn, to achieve, to lead, to inspire. It has infused you with the power to do good. You can change the world. We can't wait to see how well you do it. You are powerful. "
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The average American's water footprint is 1,800 gallons a day. Less than 10 percent of that comes out of the faucet. Water is embedded in everything we do. It takes 634 gallons of water to produce a hamburger and 2,900 to make a pair of jeans.
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"I was a musician before I was a writer, so music is very important to me, When I am thinking about finding a person to direct a play I've written, I have to be happy with the music that they are going to use. It just wouldn't work without that."
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"Militant Islamism is a tiny social phenomenon. It has never had a viable social constituency; it's what I call an orphan. If we look at Islamism as a family, militant Islamism has always been an orphan rather than a major player."
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"Baseball has so many moving parts to it, that it kind of reminds me of a science experiment in a lot of ways…. Certainly, an engineering mind can celebrate that."
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"Travel should change you, get you out of your comfort zone. When you travel, you realize there're exciting struggles going on that we would be clueless to if we didn't get out there and talk to these people."
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"The developing world uses more energy in a year than the entire developed world and that gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger as we go into the future. Countries like China and India, that is where the growth is coming from. If you're a country in the Middle East and you're thinking about where your markets are, where your growing markets are, your growing markets are in the East, not in the West."
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"This is a time of goose bumps and chills, of grace notes and gratitude, of excitement that warms the heart and shapes the soul with a recognition that, indeed, nothing is impossible."
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"No matter how much confidence you have in someone, you don't know, until you actually you see them under that kind of relentless pressure, how they'll handle it. Little by little it became very, very clear that he had presidential qualities to him, because every time we were at our worst moments, he was at his best."
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"The University of Delaware transformed me -- and not only because it was here that I met my husband, Joe. The University of Delaware transformed me because that's what education does. Your best professors can inspire you. Your peers can motivate you to be better than you ever imagined. Your favorite courses can literally alter the path you take in life."
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"I get energized every time I come on campus. The students here at the University of Delaware, they get it."
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"Your degree from the University of Delaware has prepared you to think, to learn, to achieve, to lead, to inspire. It has infused you with the power to do good. You can change the world. We can't wait to see how well you do it. You are powerful. "
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"It's very easy in this day and age to kind of look the other way. It's very tempting to ignore the sadness of other people's lives. But I think it's important that we not turn away, that we look directly into the things that scare us most."
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"The best ideas [for improving schools] come from great principals, great teachers, great superintendents and great districts making a difference in students' lives. We have this amazing opportunity to invest in what works and erase the achievement gap and raise the bar to a different level for our children."
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"In the Arab world, the most marginalized groups of people are young people and women. They don't have access to mainstream media, they don't have access to the establishment politics, so they go online and they create a space that is now impacting the real world. The virtual world is now having an impact on the real world."
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"Whatever uncompromising idealism that was formed in you by a professor you admired, whatever unbending convictions about what is right and wrong, black and white, which you stuck to in student government debates, even when your cause seemed lost, whatever principled behavior you demanded from the administration here, or from fellow students supporting the same cause, whatever you do, do not leave it here. There is nothing our country needs more right now."
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"Militant Islamism is a tiny social phenomenon. It has never had a viable social constituency; it's what I call an orphan. If we look at Islamism as a family, militant Islamism has always been an orphan rather than a major player."
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"This is the most dynamic era of scientific change in human history. Solutions developed today may not work five years from now. So we have to design government structures that are permanently evolving and permanently adaptable. The society that can best adapt to change is going to be healthier, more productive and safer."
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"Baseball has so many moving parts to it, that it kind of reminds me of a science experiment in a lot of ways…. Certainly, an engineering mind can celebrate that."
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"It's easy to dismiss people or not pay attention to them when you don't know anything about them. If you don't know them in any way, you don't have a stake in them. You have a stake in people that you know."
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"I keep competing to spread the message that I was taught. But I can't do it alone. I need you, but I don't need your time or your money. I need you to challenge yourself to be the best you can be -- for yourself, your family, your friends, your company.... You have to ask yourself how good you want to be."
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"What we pay for a product often does not reflect the true value of that good. It doesn't reflect fair working conditions, it doesn't reflect environmental controls, and so ultimately, by not paying that, we are creating problems overseas and for ourselves. The working conditions in China are very much connected to all of us as consumers."
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"I always tell people I'm a skeptic but not a cynic, because if you're a cynic, that means you've decided what you believe and you're done. But if you're a skeptic, you keep asking questions. It doesn't mean you always get the answers you want, but it means that your mind is always open to the possibility that the answer is there."
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"The U.S. economy has proven itself over the years to be flexible and resilient as well as innovative and productive, qualities that enable it to rebound from serious economic shocks, and I am confident that, in a like manner, we will rebound from our current economic and financial challenges."
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"We've known each other for 30 years, we've been friends an awfully long time. When we started doing PTI and the television sets would be on in the Washington Post newsroom, nobody even looked up because they were so used to us doing this, yelling and screaming at each other and making fun of one another for years and years and years, that they just assumed we were still in the building."
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"The '80s were different, too, because they didn't want to hear from Latin actors. All they wanted Latin actors for was to be drug dealers, gangsters, murderers or janitors."
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"Having been brought up on the parental advice of 'just be yourself' is pretty useless because, if you wanted to be someone else, how would you go about it? The whole point is that this notion of an etiquette-free society had been taught to a generation, and they were not happy. Not only were they not getting what they wanted, they were outraged at the way other people were treating them."
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"To manage to hold our own, we must become smarter, wiser and more knowledgeable about the rest of the world and understand the new ways we could play a useful, beneficial leadership role working with respected partners. We have historically been admired as a nation that could attract able people with our hopes and aspirations - an exporter of hope, not fear - has been who we have been, and it is ... who we must be again."
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"There are 120 million children in the world who can't go to school, and 78 million of these children are female. I think that the top global priority is that every single child in the world should be able to go to school."
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Describing his business venture which morphed into PayPal: "The initial idea was to put all the information in one place, to make it easier to transfer securities and cash from one customer to another by their email addresses. What people really responded to was emailing money. Folks really took to that."
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"Change is the way of the future, and while that will mean different things to different people, I think the one thing it means is that we can't keep doing what we have been doing and survive."
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"What I advocate is that children learn at least three other languages. They need to start young, because it is almost impossible to learn languages after age 12."
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"Electric cars can be fast, futuristic and fun. In President Taft's time, they were for ladies who didn't want to get their fingers dirty and for doctors who didn't want to be bothered with gasoline engines."
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"The media does play a role in socializing our culture, and in the American culture they show who is considered part of our culture and who is considered an outsider. In the media context, we need to consider how they determine who is part of our culture and how these roles are being processed."
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The average American's water footprint is 1,800 gallons a day. Less than 10 percent of that comes out of the faucet. Water is embedded in everything we do. It takes 634 gallons of water to produce a hamburger and 2,900 to make a pair of jeans.
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"Many people thought that the younger voters would get excited about the Obama candidacy, but would not follow through. Youth participation was very fundamental in our success."
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"If [solutions to the world's problems] were easy, they would've been solved before, and we have to be patient as the president wrestles his way through all of these. The one thing that I am absolutely sure of is that the world will continue to look to America for leadership. We will continue to be criticized, but also respected, treasured, but sometimes diminished.""
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"You are at a place in your lives where you can set the course for doing right, as well as doing well, for yourselves. Just ask yourself questions like, 'At what price do we strive to be successful?' 'At what cost do we want to be liked?' Your lives will be shaped by the answers you give to these questions as you make the choices to respond to the chances presented to you."
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"I was a musician before I was a writer, so music is very important to me, When I am thinking about finding a person to direct a play I've written, I have to be happy with the music that they are going to use. It just wouldn't work without that."
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"Because of the history that the University of Delaware and [the state of] Delaware have with respect to wind power, I expect that Delaware will be at the point of the spear in terms of making this new energy source a reality."
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"When the campaign becomes a do-or-die affair based on winning one state, then you know you have to be more competitive. The Republican Party will be back; it's just a question of how long it will take."
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"I grew up in a generation believing very strongly and realistically in the possibility of peace. But if you asked young people today if they can foresee peace in the future, they would say 'no.' The reason is not that they don't want to believe, but that they have lost faith in the possibility of peace. Young people now are growing up knowing that their children may have to fight another war."
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"Do your best and forget the rest. If you take short cuts, you will get cut short."
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"As we saw on 9/11, the world is a small place now and the U.S. has no possibility of being isolated. So, as long as the world we live in is one where people can travel and interact internationally, then we have to care about our international reputation."
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"We're ardently searching for evidence of life on our closest planet. I think it's coming, I really do. At some point, we"ll turn over a rock, and 'by gosh' there it is."
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"Travel should change you, get you out of your comfort zone. When you travel, you realize there're exciting struggles going on that we would be clueless to if we didn't get out there and talk to these people."
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"You guys all live in a world where there are a lot of expectations about what science is going to deliver to you, to deliver to us, the problems that science is going to solve. So you have to decide what problem it is that you care so passionately about and are so interested in and is so important that it's going to consume your life and your attention and your energy for some number of years."
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" have found usually, when we first walk into a room, we have two views of people, 'us' and 'them.' When we ask people to write down the characteristics of 'us' and 'them,' and to share the list, people are amazed that the 'us' group shares the same characteristics of the 'them' group."
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"This is something you should learn about people in the sports industry, in whatever capacity they work. We like people that we like. We root for people we like because we actually know them.”
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"Your mind, like mine, is a muscle, and muscles need exercise... . Start today, and read one hour every day for the rest of your life. The best part is that the books are not assigned. You get to pick them."
