Quotes & Sayings About Commencement Speeches

President Obama and Mitt Romney both gave commencement speeches over the last few days. Obama was like, 'You can be whatever you want to be,' while Romney was like, 'I can be whatever you want me to be.' — Jimmy Fallon

Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated. — Garry Trudeau

Horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live
they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley — Robert Bly

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. — David Foster Wallace

One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren't sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education. — Edward Gibbon