Bill and Melinda Gates’ commencement speech, Sunday June 15 at Stanford University

 Bill: “Optimism is often dismissed as false hope. But there is also false hopelessness. That’s the attitude that says we can’t defeat poverty and disease. We absolutely can.”Melinda: “When we strip away our luck and privilege and consider where we’d be without them, it becomes easier to see someone who’s poor and sick and say, ‘That could be me.’ This is empathy; it tears down barriers and opens up new frontiers for optimism.”Bill (talking about a woman in Africa): “She went to a doctor, and he told her she had drug-resistant TB. She was later diagnosed with AIDS. She wasn’t going to live much longer, but there were plenty of MDR patients waiting to take her bed when she vacated it. This was hell with a waiting list.”Melinda: “As you leave Stanford, take your genius and your optimism and your empathy and go change the world in ways that will make millions of others optimistic as well. In the course of your lives, without any plan on your part, you’ll come to see suffering that will break your heart. When it happens, and it will, don’t turn away from it; turn toward it. That is the moment when change is born.”