Take This Advice: The Best Graduation Speeches Ever Given

-- YOKO ONO

"MAKE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU A BETTER ONE BY GOING INTO IT WITH ALL BOLDNESS."

-- SEAMUS HEANEY

"REMEMBER ALWAYS TO SIT UP STRAIGHT."

-- MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT

Take This Advice delivers thirty of the most powerful and inspiring commencement speeches given in the past ten years. With grace and humor, this generation's favorite artists and thinkers address graduates to celebrate an incredible achievement, and to let them know that life after school is not the end of the world -- in fact, it's the beginning.

"THIS IS YOUR TIME. TAKE IT ON."

-- TOM BROKAW

"BE FREE, AND DANCE THROUGH LIFE."

— YOKO ONO

"MAKE THE WORLD BEFORE YOU A BETTER ONE BY GOING INTO IT WITH ALL BOLDNESS."

— SEAMUS HEANEY

"REMEMBER ALWAYS TO SIT UP STRAIGHT."

— MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT

Take This Advice delivers thirty of the most powerful and inspiring commencement speeches given in the past ten years. With grace and humor, this generation's favorite artists and thinkers address graduates to celebrate an incredible achievement, and to let them know that life after school is not the end of the world — in fact, it's the beginning.

"THIS IS YOUR TIME. TAKE IT ON."

— TOM BROKAW

Sandra Bark is the author of Cheap & Easy: A Cookbook for Girls on the Go and editor of Beautiful as the Moon, Radiant as the Stars: Jewish Women in Yiddish Stories and Writers Workshop in a Box. She lives in Brooklyn.