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This Article is From May 27, 2016

This Harvard Graduate's Speech is Going Viral. 10 Best Lines

Quick Take
Summary is AI generated, newsroom reviewed.
Donovan Livingston's speech is both uplifting and inspiring
He performed a poignant poem titled "Lift Off" to talk about education
The speech was made for Harvard's Graduate School of Education on May 25
Donovan Livingston, we presume? That's a name "we will hear again and again. He is a game changer," says Michelle Flowers, one among the thousands commenting on the Harvard graduate's speech that is currently going viral. Every student, teacher and parent - heck, pretty much everyone in the world - needs to hear his uplifting and inspiring words.

For his commencement speech at Harvard's Graduate School of Education on May 25, Donovan Livingston chose to perform a poignant spoken-word poem he entitled "Lift Off" to talk about education -- in history, what it means to him as an African-American man, and what likely course educators should take for the future.

Here are 10 of the most powerful and compelling lines from his speech. He starts with a quote by Horace Mann from the 1800s that talks about education being an equalizer. 

1. On America's history of race relations: 
For some, the only difference between a classroom and a plantation is time.

2. On diversity and inclusion:
How many times must we be made to feel like quotas -
Like tokens in coined phrases?

3. On being unstoppable:
My past, alone won't allow me to sit still.
So my body, like the mind
Cannot be contained.

4. On those looking to transform the world:
As educators, rather than raising your voices
Over the rustling of our chains,
Take them off. Un-cuff us.

5. On every human being's latent potential:
At the core, none of us were meant to be common.
We were born to be comets,
Darting across space and time -
Leaving our mark as we crash into everything.

6. On what real change looks like: 
A crater is a reminder that something amazing happened here -
An indelible impact that shook up the world.

7. On injustice in the education system against children:
Injustice is telling them education is the key
While you continue to change the locks.

8. On what the world really needs from every person: 
So wake up - wake up! Lift your voices
Until you've patched every hole in a child's broken sky.

9. On accepting and propagating change:
I've been a Black hole in the classroom for far too long;
Absorbing everything, without allowing my light escape.
But those days are done. I belong among the stars.

10. On the future: 
No, sky is not the limit. It is only the beginning.
Lift off.