Because we did not believe strongly enough, or dream strongly enough that we could change the future, the future happened without us. Today, despite the fact that we live in a new world dreamed by others in a very recent past, it is still easy for young people to believe that the future will be made by someone else. That it is so vast, so huge, so unchangeable that no personal or private act of thought or imagination can change it. In that case, the future will happen without them also. What I want to say most of all today is that now, more than ever, you cannot let that happen.
Every generation has a dream.
Every generation has the choice of whether or not to dream it. You stand, as a graduating class, at a crossroads in the history of the relation between past and future. You face an absolutely unique challenge in terms of future dreams. You are leaving as the first graduating class of this new, technological millennium. And you are going into a world so new we can hardly recognize it as the one we have always lived in.