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Thank you very much to thee. Thank you. It's a...So: after over 100 years of Class Days, finally you get a British speaker.
What took you so long? Did that little disagreement of 1776 really rankle so much? And why now? Is it because British election campaigns only last four weeks?
For whatever reason, it is an honour to be here and to say to the Yale College Class of 2008: you did it; you came through; from all of us to you: congratulations.
The invitation to a former British Prime Minister to address a college which boasts five former Presidents, many former Vice Presidents and Senators too numerous to mention, is either to give me an exaggerated sense of my own importance or you a reduced sense of yours.
贵校培养出了5位美国总统、很多副总统和难以数计的参议院，却邀请一位前英国首相来发表演讲，这要么是夸大了我的重要性，要么就是减小了你们的重要性。
It was Churchill or Oscar Wilde—and there is a difference—who called us two nations divided by a common language and so we are.
是丘吉尔还是奥斯卡•王尔德——这两人当然是有区别的——把英美两国说成是由一种相同的语言划分的两个不同的国家，你们可以从我今天的出场来判断这一点，事实确实如此。
Here I am at Yale and set to come back for the fall semester. My old Oxford tutor was, I'm afraid, horrified to hear I had been taken on by Yale. His worries were all for Yale I may say. He said: "I only hope for their sake you are going there to learn rather than teach."
