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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
Steve Case: I think it's really about hope and optimism and possibility. I think a great example -- because we happen to be talking when Ronald Reagan passed away, and this has been a week celebrating his life. I think he is the prototypical example of the American dream. Somebody who came up from modest beginnings, had a certain perspective on life and was an actor, when people didn't necessarily think he could act or that he should act, and then moved from that into a position of leadership in the Motion Picture Association, and then decided to move into politics as governor and then president. I think most people would have to say -- whether you liked his politics or didn't -- that he in his 93 years on earth lived an extraordinary life and really is an example of the boundless possibilities and optimism of America.
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Steve Case
Co-Founder, America Online
I find it interesting that in America, even though most people are more optimistic and most people around the world do view America as the city on the hill and more entrepreneurial and more risk taking and less traditional, still in America most people don't take risks, and most people are pretty traditional. It's actually a relatively small number of people that really are those risk takers, and a relatively small number of people that end up really having an impact on the world, and it doesn't take a lot of people. It just takes a few people who really care and stick with it, and that I think is what America is about. I think that's one of the things that's great really about The American Academy of Achievement, really shining a spotlight on that notion that anything is possible, but it starts with somebody having a dream and sticking with that through thick and thin.
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Johnnetta Cole
Past President of Spelman College
I hope that what we have is just the beginning of what it is that we can become. Because what it is that we say and what it is that we do, must absolutely come into greater harmony. This is a nation whose spoken and written vision is chillingly beautiful. That each should have an opportunity. That work will get you where you need to be. That we need to respect each other, including our differences. That's a mighty vision, it's a precious way to talk about the American democracy.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
Francis Collins: I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, on a small farm with no plumbing. It was a fairly arduous existence during the winter, because we had stock that had to be taken care of. It all sounds very pastoral. It was hard work, but it was also educationally challenging in a good way, because my father was a Ph.D. in English, and my mother a very talented playwright. My mother decided that the county schools were not a place where a young person would learn to love learning. And so she kept my brother and me at home and taught us there until the sixth grade. And that was I think probably a very important part of my life's experience, because I really did learn how to love acquiring new information.
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Francis Collins
Presidential Medal of Freedom
I now think I'm the luckiest guy in science. I have a chance to stand at the helm of a project that I honestly believe is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon. This is an adventure into ourselves. To figure out, what are the instructions that allow us as human beings to carry out all of our biological attributes? I think all of history, and the history of biology and medicine, will be divided by this stunning achievement. Of what we knew before we knew the human genome sequence, and what we were able to do after that. And for me, this kid from the small farm in Virginia, to have a chance to oversee that is just an astounding thing.
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