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Mike Krzyzewski
Collegiate Basketball Champion
Mike Krzyzewski: Both sets of grandparents were born in Poland. There was no way that they could have foreseen. No way my mother -- when I used to come back to Chicago in recruiting, I'd always stay with my mother. My Dad passed away when I was a senior at West Point. I'd come back, and we'd already been on TV, and she would just be sitting there late at night, and she'd say, "Mike, how is it you?" And she wasn't knocking me, it was just that our group of people weren't supposed to be able to do that. I would always tell her, I said, "Ma, because of you." I said, "You made me good enough, where I can do this. You made enough sacrifices to put me with people who would help train me to do this. It's because of you." And I hope that whatever I do, I can do that for my kids.
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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
We did a story about a black family in the poorest part of Mississippi one time, the Chandlers. There were eight or nine children and the oldest of them decided he wanted to go to college, which had never happened in that family, I assure you. All his parents could do for him was hitch up the mule to the wagon -- they didn't own either the mule or the wagon -- and go into town and borrow two dollars for bus fare to send him off to college. From that beginning he became Dr. Cleveland Chandler, the head of the Department of Economics at Howard University. And, each of his younger brothers in sisters in turn went on to college, most of them to graduate degrees. There was a Baptist minister from Colorado and the head nutritionist of a veteran's hospital in Kansas City, people of accomplishment in every case. And, one of them wrote me a letter and said, "You really ought to come see us because we are something." Their parents' 50th anniversary was coming up, it happened also to be Thanksgiving Day. From all over America, all the children came back to the new house they had built to replace the shack they had grown up in. And, looking back on those days of picking cotton all summer to afford to go back to school, helping the younger brothers and sisters accomplish what they had accomplished and looking back on the humblest beginnings that any family could ever have, all we did all afternoon was cry.
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Charles Kuralt
A Life On the Road
Mr. Chandler couldn't get through the blessing at the Thanksgiving dinner. I looked over at Izzy Bleckman, the camera man I worked with all these years and he was not able to look through the viewfinder of the camera and I was weeping too, everybody was. And, what were we weeping about? The American Dream, this notion that, if you really want to in a country like this, you can start from nothing and make a success of yourself. Maybe not a rich man or a rich woman, but a success. The kind of success that you look into your own heart and find is there. That is not possible in most countries of the world to this day, but it still is possible here. That's something very precious. I've kept up with the Chandlers. One of the grandchildren played violin in Carnegie Hall last year. It goes in circles. The dream doesn't stop. It makes me cry to think about it.
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Ray Kurzweil
Pioneer in Artificial Intelligence
Ray Kurzweil: The American Dream is pushing beyond our boundaries and to new frontiers. Some of those new frontiers centuries ago were conquering new landmasses, but now our frontiers are intellectual. And in the area of knowledge, and in all of our cultural and scientific endeavors, there's a respect for taking risks. There's a tolerance and even a respect for failure -- which some other cultures have some difficulty with -- for experimenting, and for learning, and the trial and error that goes with that. A respect for the individual, and that we're all different, and all have a contribution to make in respect for diversity and tolerance of differences. Even though we see a lot of prejudice and intolerance, our ideals reflect a tolerance for diversity, and I think we'll see greater diversity in the century ahead. So that's what the American ideal -- the American Dream -- means, and I think it's a perfect set of ideals and philosophies for this new era.
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