Top 171 Graduation Quotes

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

It’s not how much you spend, it’s how you spend it. We have been putting a lot of money into education in the state of Nevada, and it’s gotten us to 50th in the country in graduation rates. We needed more accountability in our system.

I think about the milestones from my childhood and what it will be like to watch our kids go through them. Taking Riley to her first day of school was a whirlwind. I can’t imagine what middle school is going to be like, and high school, and graduation.

For good nurture and education implant good constitutions.

I first became interested in women and religion when I was one of the few women doing graduate work in Religious Studies at Yale University in the late 1960’s.

Simple health interventions such as lead paint abatement and home visiting for pregnant women result in not only improved health for children but also higher rates of graduation, reduced crime, and a more robust workforce.

I love graduation speeches. I have always loved them; I will always love them.

I started training at a local gym in New Jersey, and the day of my high school graduation, I packed up everything in my car and moved to Coconut Creek, Florida, where I trained with one of the best gyms in the world, American Top Team.

By the time he arrived in Texas – via the red 1947 Studebaker Dad’s parents gave him as a graduation gift – he was ready for the challenge of making his way in the oil business.

If someone comes to you with, ‘It’s my kid’s graduation,’ you don’t tell them, ‘Sorry, you can’t go to that.’ You just don’t do that. You figure out some other way.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

We had an argument, and he told me to be home at midnight, and I said no. And so when I did come home, the door was locked. And I had gotten a set of luggage for graduation that day, and it was on the front porch, packed. He thought that he was going to prove a point and I was going to say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry’.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

I pretty much bailed on high school. I mean, I graduated, but I wasn’t even there for my own graduation.

I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan – it was a graduation requirement.

My roots are in music. But Eileen Ford saw my high school graduation picture, and next thing I knew I was on a plane to New York. That’s what threw a monkey wrench in it. The modeling.

I’m very thankful I went to college, because I’ve seen the difference that it makes for me in the professional world. After graduation, I was building a name for myself in the Chicago theater scene, but there was always this pull to L.A.

Our record number of teenagers must become our record number of high school and college graduates and our record number of teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and skilled professionals.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian.

I was full of pride when President Obama talked about coding in his last State of the Union address. I was proud when Chicago recently made computer science mandatory as a requirement for graduation. To see this elevate to the level of a bigger conversation is progress.

I went to Legoland in Denmark when I was five, I think, but I went to Germany when I was 17 to have a little adventure after graduation.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

After my graduation from Sydenham College with a degree in Commerce, I was spotted by late Sunil Dutt, my idol, to act in films.

When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn’t realize it would take so long.

When I was at Tech, no public school was ahead of us in graduation rates. We got our guys to compete in the classroom, and if they’re competing in class and in football, that’s an attitude they take into life.

I was given a new coat as a high school graduation gift.

I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.

It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realised I’d become an actor.

Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it’s in Hamburger Technology.

When I was in school, my mother stressed education. I am so glad she did. I graduated from Yale College and Yale University with my master’s and I didn’t do it by missing school.

The doer alone learneth.

Mentors provide professional networks, outlets for frustration, college and career counseling, general life advice, and most importantly, an extra voice telling a student they are smart enough and capable enough to cross the stage at graduation and land their first paycheck from a career pathway job.

At the end of four years’ time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there’s your numbers.

After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.

Upon graduation, believe it or not, I had no job. I had no interviews. I had no prospects. I had no worries. What I did have, I had passion. I had enormous passion. I had passion for financial markets. I had fallen in love with financial markets.

I see myself being a great-grandmother at my great-grandson’s graduation from a school that has my name on it.

After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

Yeah, I spent about 20 years in a dorm room. It took me a while to graduate.

Americans in particular are myopic. They’re not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That’s what I did. I went to Indonesia.

When I was in college, my graduation thesis was called ‘Female Directors.’ I interviewed all of the important female directors from Mexico. There were four. That was it.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I’d be a lousy businessman, and if I didn’t give acting a try I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that ‘individuality’ is the key to success.

It is virtually impossible to compete in today’s global economy without a college degree.

The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

After graduation from high school, I attended the university entrance examination, and fortunately, I was accepted by the Department of Pharmacy and became a student at the Medical School of Peking University.

It’s my goal to make martial arts compulsory for girls in school. In China, you have to do two years of martial arts’ training without which you cannot get a graduation degree.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

I always wanted to have my own album released before I graduated from high school.

If you’re picking your best friend based on what kind of clothes she wears or how popular she is, chances are you aren’t going to stay in touch after graduation.

A month before graduation I got an off-Broadway job. Then I did some commercials, including one for MCI. You can only see half of me, but it paid well. Thank God for commercials.

Even though I disagree with many of the changes, when I see the privates graduate at the end of the day, when they walk off that drill field at the end of the ceremony, they are still fine privates; outstanding, well motivated privates.

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

A few months after graduation I was working in films. It took off pretty quick.

Adults tell students that it gets better, that the world changes after school, that being ‘different’ will pay off sometime after graduation. But no one explains to them why.

Graduation speeches force you to reflect. They are about consciousness. Nothing is better than consciousness.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

When I was growing up, we were in a high income bracket, one of the highest. I was one of the first in high school to get a car. And I didn’t have to wait for it to be a graduation present, either. We’ve probably got one of the nicest houses in Sacramento.

I have a 4-year-old and a 14-year-old, and think I missed a recital and a graduation, and they were like ‘It’s OK mommy, we’ll take pictures.’ It was my upset, though… they were just fine! I just give them a kiss and a hug and let them know that I love them every day.

When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money.

I missed out on a few proms, homecomings, might miss my graduation. I wouldn’t want it any other way… it’s worth it.

All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in ‘Sister Act’ and haven’t looked back since.

I think women as well as men are concerned about jobs and the economy and spending and, and other issues. They’re concerned that when their kids graduate from college they have an economy and they have a future in this country and they, they have the same opportunity that we’ve had and our grandparents have had.

I went to military college in Canada and graduated as an officer in the Navy but also as an engineer.

It’s very interesting, if you look at a study that was done by the Brookings Institute back in 2009, they determined that if Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty. Three things. Work, graduate from high school, and get married before you have children.

In the summer we graduated we flipped out completely, drinking beer, cruising in our cars and beating up each other. It was a crazy summer. That’s when I started to be interested in girls.

I dropped out of college before graduation. I opted to begin work as an actress.

Bullying is something every kid in public, parochial, or private school has witnessed by graduation. While unfortunate, it is part of growing up.

Our promise to our children should be this: if you do well in school, we will pay for you to obtain a college degree.

I was a radio jockey after graduation. I was 22, the youngest RJ in Delhi at that time.

I’ve told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

I have actually five honorary degrees.

In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate.

Graduation is an important day. It is a significant achievement.

Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

After I did my graduation in mechanical engineering, I got a scholarship to go to the U.S. to do my master’s. So I did that. I also worked there for a while. After my master’s, I did a course in Film Appreciation.

One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark’s Saturday night ‘American Bandstand’ show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.

What I like about graduation speeches is that they’re an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It’s like a sanctioned self-help moment.

God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease.

Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor’s appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.

I was really desperate. I don’t know if you can remember back that far, but when I went to graduate school they didn’t want females in graduate school. They were very open about it. They didn’t mince their words. But then I got in and I got my degree.

When I came to Chennai from Coimbatore after my graduation, looking for acting chances, it was for dubbing that I was first tried.

After graduation, I moved to Los Angeles to do more theater, not realizing there is very little theater in L.A. It was a lucky mistake, though, because after just 2 1/2 months of waiting tables, my TV and film career really took off.

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I’m very happy I didn’t submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.

I did schooling and graduation from Delhi and then went to the National School of Drama.

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.

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

To serve in the modern military – or to be the uncle, parent or sibling of one who does – is to treat the necessary service and sacrifice of war with a sacred honor. In my community, we pile into cars and drive hundreds of miles to watch our children’s graduation from basic training.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.

I don’t look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

I studied journalism at Binghamton University, even interning for NBC’s longtime anchor Carol Jenkins. Before graduation, I told my parents I wanted to pursue broadcast journalism.

I have studied and graduated out of Delhi. I moved to Mumbai after graduation.

I graduated a the top of my class in the ’84 Olympic Games; I won a gold medal.

There’s no guarantees in anything you do. But I hope there are many more weekends I can race in my life, and high school graduation you only do once.

I did get a degree in special education.

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

I studied finance and accounting in college, and I worked at a massive accounting firm out of graduation.

I was the first boy in the Kennedy family to graduate from college.

All real education is the architecture of the soul.

I don’t remember at all what was said at my college graduation, and I think that’s the case for many people.

I started traveling, performing, doing photo shoots and working on new music. At the same time, I was juggling homework and trying not to miss out on too many experiences during my junior and senior years – like prom and graduation.

All of us have to win games. Whether we like it or not, the graduation rates and all the things people are talking about aren’t as important as winning.

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’

I would say the most memorable thing that has ever happened to me has to be when I got my First class honours Law degree at my University graduation. All my family from all over the world were there when I collected my degree. I will never forget that day.

School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.

I had a chance to win $2 million, a week after high school graduation, and if I turned pro, the sponsor was going to financially support me.

It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school.

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

I did graduate with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1948.

I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology.

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It’s a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle.

Right after graduation, I married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, an academic administrator. I spent the next ten years in Connecticut, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., raising our children, Christopher, Tom, and Lucy.

I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn’t even give me one because I didn’t have my high school graduation.

This man used to go to school with his dog. Then they were separated. His dog graduated!

I’ve done photo shoots for fashion brand catalogues and participated in graduation shows for fashion colleges.

I have a good cry once in a while; it’s such a great release. Or it could be a cry of joy – watching your child being born or your child walking across a graduation stage.

I did my graduation in hospitality in Jaipur. When I was working, I started getting offers in modeling and did a few South films.

Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

My main objective is to prepare candidates for professional baseball; however, the majority of our graduates will go home as much better qualified amateurs.

I’m not impressed by someone’s degree… I’m impressed by them making movies.

The day after my high school graduation in 1952, I headed to Alaska. I was 17. I started out greasing equipment, then became a heavy-crane operator. I made and saved good money there for two years.

At graduation, I assumed I’d be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master’s degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

I disagree with a lot of those changes, however at the end of the day – I go down to recruit graduation at least once or twice a year.

You know what has made me the happiest I’ve ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate from college. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing.

My first jobs after graduation in 1955 were as a project engineer for G.E. and later with the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., where I met and married my wife, Dolores Celini.

I didn’t even walk for graduation – I did graduate, though. I got this homeschool deal. I didn’t have to go to school because I was depressed, and my mom wrote all these essays for me. I didn’t write one of them. She literally got me my diploma.

God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

I vividly remember my first meeting with Farooque Shaikh. It was in 1975. I had just returned from New York after completing my graduation and was looking for opportunities to begin a career as an actor.

After graduation, I took a job with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in software development. I don’t think I was there more than a month.

I’m not sure if they do this in the States, but in Korea, until high school, on your graduation diploma there’s a line that states your future goal. Kids write ‘president’ or ‘astronaut,’ or whatever. I always wrote ‘singer.’

I have the loving support of my girlfriend who still attends Wake Forest and is nearing graduation. She helps me cope with the everyday rigors of being an NBA player.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

I applied to only one college – the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania – and was fortunate to be accepted. After graduation, I headed to Wall Street and worked as I had dreamed.

After completing my graduation, I went to Mumbai and started working as an assistant casting director. I worked on films like ‘Talaash,’ ‘Ek Mai Aur Ekk Tu,’ ‘Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani’ and ‘Student Of The Year,’ among others.

I have done my post graduation in Business Administration.

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do.

At a very young age, my beloved mother passed away from leukemia, forcing my father to become a single dad. Rather than coddle me, shelter me, or do things for me, he taught me to ‘Make the Case’ for everything in life – from my first job to a graduation trip I wanted.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

The only thing urban about me is the parties. I have almost always been a suburbanite. I got a car for my graduation. I want to have a manicured lawn and have my son go to a good college.

My graduation was an amazing moment for my family, my community. In my early childhood, we lived on a subsidized income, with government assistance – at one point when I was growing up, my mother was making $14,000 a year. Now I had made it out of the hood, so to speak.

Post my graduation, I really thought that acting was something I wanted to do. I simply took a chance and started auditioning, and I loved it.

Having a college degree gave me the opportunity to be… well-rounded. Also, the people I met at the university, most of them are still my colleagues now. People I’ve known for years are all in the industry together.

The federal government requires that its loans be paid back within 10 years of graduation, and Harvard has pegged its loans to the same 10-year timetable. Yet despite Harvard’s low default rate, the idea of years of loan debt is daunting for some students even before it’s time to pay back.

I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.

Catholic school graduates exhibit a wide variety of qualities that will not only help them in their careers but also in their family and community lives.

I accidentally forgot to graduate from college.

North Dakota State. What do you have to do there to graduate? Milk a cow with your left hand?

The government sets targets for increased four-year high school graduation rates as part of its agenda for improving Americans’ health.

At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.

I took three years off. I differentiated myself from the industry. Found my identity – sort of… I haven’t graduated yet. I’m not legitimately educated yet, but maybe one day.

I received $100 per week when I started working at the Globe after graduation.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

I teach one semester a year, and this year I’m just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It’s what you learn, what you think. That’s all that counts.

We don’t stop going to school when we graduate.

I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

Life is the most exciting opportunity we have. But we have one shot. You graduate from college once, and that’s it. You’re going out of that nest. And you have to find that courage that’s deep, deep, deep in there. Every step of the way.

School days were very special to me as I never found the time to complete my graduation.

When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn’t believe I was at.

After the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, primary education was made free. We are now thinking to make education in the public sector free up to graduation level. We are also thinking of providing a light meal at primary and secondary schools in order to increase the student retention level.

When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That’s what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was ‘You’re a Big Boy Now.’