‘Enjoy your differences, but realise that your common humanity matters much more’: Bill Clinton

Speaking at Harvard University in 2007, former US President Bill Clinton gave an impassioned speech. He started with a joke, “I couldn’t figure out why, on a day that’s supposed to be an occasion of fun and celebration, you would pick a gray-haired 60-year-old to speak.” But soon he graduated to more serious matters. “I believe that Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Bono were asked here by people who believe that our common humanity is more important than our differences,” he said.

He also stressed that though their education has trained them to, “believe that the .1 per cent that makes you different is the sum of who you are and that you deserve your good fortune.”

His word of advice, instead, was to be with others, to be true to traditions of the other greats who were there before them and to always remember that though there will be time to enjoy good fortune and differences, nothing eventually matters more than common humanity.

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“[B]e true to the traditions of the great people who have come here and think about the other 99.9 percent … Enjoy your good fortune, enjoy your differences, but realise that your common humanity matters much, much more,” he said.

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