Our newspapers, for the most part, are filled with photos of high school graduates and some college graduates. It is indeed a milestone to graduate, and it will be a feat you, your parents and grandparents will remember for years to come.
Fortunately, this year we all have live ceremonies with much pomp and circumstance. I can only think back to the COVID years when graduates weren’t allowed to have live ceremonies. Instead, it was done online. In this writer’s opinion, that was deplorable, and our leaders who led the COVID scare, and demanded that people cannot congregate, should be ashamed.
Rather than me pontificating, I thought I would share some quotations from leaders, who implored graduates to make a positive contribution in this world or just had a humorous thought or told about their graduation experience. Here they are:
God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease. Bernie Siegel
In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’ Jimmy Carter
A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that ‘individuality’ is the key to success. Robert Orben
I think women as well as men are concerned about jobs and the economy and spending and, and other issues. They’re concerned that when their kids graduate they have an economy and they have a future in this country and they, they have the same opportunity that we’ve had and our grandparents have had. Ken Buck
You know what has made me the happiest I’ve ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing. Gil Scott-Heron
I’ve told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being ‘different’ will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why. Alexandra Robbins
I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation. Stephen Curry
I went to my son’s graduation this weekend, and I heard a great quote I’ve never heard before from Albert Einstein. It was that the greatest danger to the world is not the bad people but it’s the good people who don’t speak out. Hamilton Jordan
