Address at Moscow State University (May 31, 1988)- Ronald Wilson Reagan
President Reagan speaks of specific freedoms in the United States that he hopes Russians
themselves will be able to experience. He introduces the possibilities of greater exchange
programs between American and Russian students, future tourism, and economic exchange
between the two nations. He speaks of strategic arms reductions, the withdrawal from
Afghanistan, and the hope for future peace in African nations.
Thank you, Rector Logunov, and I want to thank all of you very much for a very warm welcome.
It's a great pleasure to be here at Moscow State University, and I want to thank you all for
turning out. I know you must be very busy this week, studying and taking your final
examinations. So, let me just say zhelayu yam uspekha [I wish you success]. Nancy couldn't
make it today because she's visiting Leningrad, which she tells me is a very beautiful city, but
she, too, says hello and wishes you all good luck.
Let me say it's also a great pleasure to once again have this opportunity to speak directly to the
people of the Soviet Union. Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and
telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message, perhaps, but also some of the most
important business of this summit: It is a message of peace and good will and hope for a growing
friendship and closeness between our two peoples.
…Like a chrysalis, we're emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution—an economy
confined to and limited by the Earth's physical resources—into, as one economist titled his book,
"The Economy in Mind," in which there are no bounds on human imagination and the freedom
to create is the most precious natural resource. Think of that little computer chip. Its value isn't in
the sand from which it is made but in the microscopic architecture designed into it by ingenious
human minds. Or take the example of the satellite relaying this broadcast around the world,
which replaces thousands of tons of copper mined from the Earth and molded into wire. In the
new economy, human invention increasingly makes physical resources obsolete. We're breaking
through the material conditions of existence to a world where man creates his own destiny. Even
as we explore the most advanced reaches of science, we're returning to the age-old wisdom of
our culture, a wisdom contained in the book of Genesis in the Bible: In the beginning was the
spirit, and it was from this spirit that the material abundance of creation issued forth.
But progress is not foreordained. The key is freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of
information, freedom of communication. The renowned scientist, scholar, and founding father of
this university, Mikhail Lomonosov, knew that. "It is common knowledge," he said, "that the
achievements of science are considerable and rapid, particularly once the yoke of slavery is cast
off and replaced by the freedom of philosophy." You know, one of the first contacts between
your country and mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The Americans
were members of Cook's last voyage on an expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the
island of Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and together with the native
inhabitants, held a prayer service on the ice.
…In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was started by two
college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home. Some people, even in my
own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all
the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times.
And if you ask them the secret of their success, they'll tell you it's all that they learned in their
struggles along the way; yes, it's what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition or
a scholar in pursuit of the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.
…There's an old story about a town—it could be anywhere—with a bureaucrat who is known to
be a good-for-nothing, but he somehow had always hung on to power. So one day, in a town
meeting, an old woman got up and said to him: "There is a folk legend here where I come from
that when a baby is born, an angel comes down from heaven and kisses it on one part of its body.
If the angel kisses him on his hand, he becomes a handyman. If he kisses him on his forehead, he
becomes bright and clever. And I've been trying to figure out where the angel kissed you so that
you should sit there for so long and do nothing."
…We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact, it's something of a national
pastime. Every four years the American people choose a new President, and 1988 is one of those
years. At one point there were 13 major candidates running in the two major parties, not to
mention all the others, including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates—all trying to get my
job. About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and 1,700 daily newspapers—
each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the Government—report on
the candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In the end, the
people vote; they decide who will be the next President. But freedom doesn't begin or end with
elections.
Go to any American town, to take just an example, and you'll see dozens of churches,
representing many different beliefs—in many places, synagogues and mosques—and you'll see
families of every conceivable nationality worshiping together. Go into any schoolroom, and there
you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights—among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness—that no government can justly deny; the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Go into any courtroom, and there will
preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant has the
right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and women—common citizens; they are the
ones, the only ones, who weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that court, the
accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman or any official has no
greater legal standing than the word of the accused. Go to any university campus, and there
you'll find an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what
can be done to correct them. Turn on the television, and you'll see the legislature conducting the
business of government right there before the camera, debating and voting on the legislation that
will become the law of the land. March in any demonstration, and there are many of them; the
people's right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected by the police. Go into
any union hall, where the members know their right to strike is protected by law. As a matter of
fact, one of the many jobs I had before this one was being president of a union, the Screen Actors
Guild. I led my union out on strike, and I'm proud to say we won.
But freedom is more even than this. Freedom is the right to question and change the established
way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding
that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea,
scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to dream—to
follow your dream or stick to your conscience, even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters.
Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a
monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us
put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.
Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic, but Americans are one of the
most religious peoples on Earth. Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned
but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world. "Reason and experience," said
George Washington in his farewell address, "both forbid us to expect that national morality can
prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a
necessary spring of popular government."
…The irresistible power of unarmed truth. Today the world looks expectantly to signs of change,
steps toward greater freedom in the Soviet Union. We watch and we hope as we see positive
changes taking place. There are some, I know, in your society who fear that change will bring
only disruption and discontinuity, who fear to embrace the hope of the future—sometimes it
takes faith. It's like that scene in the cowboy movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which
some here in Moscow recently had a chance to see. The posse is closing in on the two outlaws,
Butch and Sundance, who find themselves trapped on the edge of a cliff, with a sheer drop of
hundreds of feet to the raging rapids below. Butch turns to Sundance and says their only hope is
to jump into the river below, but Sundance refuses. He says he'd rather fight it out with the posse,
even though they're hopelessly outnumbered. Butch says that's suicide and urges him to jump,
but Sundance still refuses and finally admits, "I can't swim." Butch breaks up laughing and says,
"You crazy fool, the fall will probably kill you." And, by the way, both Butch and Sundance
made it, in case you didn't see the movie. I think what I've just been talking about is perestroika
and what its goals are.
…Like a tree growing strong through the seasons, rooted in the Earth and drawing life from the
sun, so, too, positive change must be rooted in traditional values—in the land, in culture, in
family and community—and it must take its life from the eternal things, from the source of all
life, which is faith. Such change will lead to new understandings, new opportunities, to a broader
future in which the tradition is not supplanted but finds its full flowering. That is the future
beckoning to your generation.
…I'm proposing an increased exchange program of high school students between our countries.
General Secretary Gorbachev mentioned on Sunday a wonderful phrase you have in Russian for
this: "Better to see something once than to hear about it a hundred times." Mr. Gorbachev and I
first began working on this in 1985. In our discussion today, we agreed on working up to several
thousand exchanges a year from each country in the near future. But not everyone can travel
across the continents and oceans. Words travel lighter, and that's why we'd like to make available
to this country more of our 11,000 magazines and periodicals and our television and radio shows
that can be beamed off a satellite in seconds. Nothing would please us more than for the Soviet
people to get to know us better and to understand our way of life.
It's my fervent hope that our constructive cooperation on these issues will be carried on to
address the continuing destruction and conflicts in many regions of the globe and that the serious
discussions that led to the Geneva accords on Afghanistan will help lead to solutions in southern
Africa, Ethiopia, Cambodia, the Persian Gulf, and Central America. I have often said: Nations do
not distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other.
If this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all the possibilities of the
technological revolution, then nations must renounce, once and for all, the right to an
expansionist foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal, not a tactical stage
in a continuing conflict.
I've been told that there's a popular song in your country—perhaps you know it—whose
evocative refrain asks the question, "Do the Russians want a war?" In answer it says: "Go ask
that silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there; beneath those trees the soldiers
lie. Go ask my mother, ask my wife; then you will have to ask no more, 'Do the Russians want a
war?'" But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced you on the Elbe? What if
we were to ask the watery graves of the Pacific or the European battlefields where America's
fallen were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their mothers, sisters, and sons, do
Americans want war? Ask us, too, and you'll find the same answer, the same longing in every
heart. People do not make wars; governments do. And no mother would ever willingly sacrifice
her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will
always choose peace.
Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After a colonial revolution with
Britain, we have cemented for all ages the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible
Civil War between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true unity as a nation. We
fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal
Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and friends.
And as important as these official people-to-people exchanges are, nothing would please me
more than for them to become unnecessary, to see travel between East and West become so
routine that university students in the Soviet Union could take a month off in the summer and,
just like students in the West do now, put packs on their backs and travel from country to country
in Europe with barely a passport cheek in between. Nothing would please me more than to see
the day that a concert promoter in, say, England could call up a Soviet rock group, without going
through any government agency, and have them playing in Liverpool the next night. Is this just a
dream? Perhaps, but it is a dream that is our responsibility to have come true.
…We do not know what the conclusion will be of this journey, but we're hopeful that the
promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed
that hope: that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoy's grave, will blossom
forth at last in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the
marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to a new
world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace.
Thank you all very much, and da blagoslovit vas gospod—God bless you.
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities
in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to
a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal.
Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for
another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate
student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be
adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a
lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they
really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the
night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course."
My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and
that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption
papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday
go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as
expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my
college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to
do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was
spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and
trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one
of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required
classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I
returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across
town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.
And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be
priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand
calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces,
about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes
great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't
capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when
we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all
into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on
that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or
proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no
personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped
in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography
that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in
college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking
backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have
to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let
me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents
garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of
us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our
finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got
fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired
someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or
so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had
a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And
very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was
devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of
entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with
David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very
public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly
began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed
that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could
have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of
being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative
periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar,
and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create
the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful
animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned
to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current
renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was
awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head
with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I
loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for
your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly
satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love
what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and
better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your
last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for
the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were
the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the
answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me
make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride,
all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving
only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to
avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no
reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it
clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors
told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to
live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in
order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you
thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure
everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say
your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an
endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my
pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told
me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it
turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the
surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more
decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when
death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And
yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be,
because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears
out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from
now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is
quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma —
which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others'
opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow
your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which
was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far
from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late
1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters,
scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before
Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had
run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back
cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you
might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words:
"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin
anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much.