English Speeches with Audio & Transcripts | Books & Articles
In her MIT Commencement 2026 speech, AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su encouraged graduates to tackle the hardest challenges, embrace the opportunities of AI, trust their engineering instincts, and create their own luck through courage, purpose, and perseverance.
Sheryl Sandberg’s 2017 Virginia Tech commencement speech is a powerful reflection on resilience, loss, and rebuilding life. This page provides the full transcript and audio of her inspiring address.
The greatest thing you build in your life will be yourself, and trust me on this you are not done yet, I know I’m not. But what you will be building is not just a toolkit. You will be building a person, and you will be doing it for people.
MIT President Sally Kornbluth urges graduates to become ambassadors for scientific thinking, discovery, and global community.
I ask that you keep MIT’s values and mission at the center of your efforts: to be bold and imaginative in tackling these big problems and to do so with compassion and generosity.
I wish four things:1. That you are bold and have good fortune. Fortune favors the bold. 2. That you give and get the feedback you need. Feedback is a gift. 3. That you empower everyone. Nothing is somebody else’s problem. 4. That you support equality. Lean In!
I hope you will carry with you MIT’s tradition of taking – and making – moonshots. Be ambitious in every facet of your life. And don’t ever let something stop you because people say it’s impossible. Let those words inspire you.
It’s not enough to be technologists — we have to make sure that technology serves people. It’s not enough or even possible to be neutral — tools are shaped by the minds that make them and by the hands that use them. And it’s not enough to have a good idea — you have to know when to stop a bad one.
There’s never a clear path to the top. But what makes it all worth it is learning that you are often stronger than you imagined, and that if you ask for help, you’ll be amazed by the people who will be there to keep you steady and on course.
One of the greatest joys in life is the feeling of using your skills to the limit, to do something important for others: your community, your discipline, your institution, your country – or even the whole human family and our fragile planet.
As you go forward today, use your minds and hands and your hearts to build something bigger than yourselves. Always remember, there is no idea bigger than this. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “All life is interrelated. We are all bound together into a single garment of destiny.”
Actor and filmmaker tells graduates: “There’s more at stake today than in any story ever told.” This is the prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by actor and filmmaker Matt Damon for the Institute’s 2016 Commencement, held June 3, 2016.