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54th Annual EMMY Awards Famous Speech by Oprah Winfrey
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54th Annual EMMY Awards Famous Speech by Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey Receives the first Bob Hope Humanitarian Award - September
22, 2002
"Thank you everybody. Thank you
Tom, and Bob and Dolores, who are home watching I hope, thank you so much,
and to everyone who voted for me.
There really is nothing more important to me than striving to be a good
human being. So, to be here tonight and be acknowledged as the first to
receive this honor is beyond expression in words for me. 'I am a human
being, nothing human is alien to me.' Terence said that in 154 B.C. and
when I first read it many years ago, I had no idea of the depth of that
meaning.
I grew up in Nashville with a father who owned a barbershop, Winfrey's
Barber Shop, he still does, I can't get him to retire. And every holiday,
every holiday, all of the transients and the guys who I thought were just
losers who hung out at the shop, and were always bumming haircuts from my
father and borrowing money from my dad, all those guys always ended up at
our dinner table. They were a cast of real characters—it was Fox and
Shorty and Bootsy and Slim. And I would say, 'Bootsy, could you pass the
peas please?' And I would often say to my father afterwards, 'Dad, why
can't we just have regular people at our Christmas dinner?'—because I was
looking for the Currier & Ives version. And my father said to me, 'They
are regular people. They're just like you. They want the same thing you
want.' And I would say, 'What?' And he'd say, 'To be fed.' And at the
time, I just thought he was talking about dinner. But I have since learned
how profound he really was, because we all are just regular people seeking
the same thing. The guy on the street, the woman in the classroom, the
Israeli, the Afghani, the Zuni, the Apache, the Irish, the Protestant, the
Catholic, the gay, the straight, you, me—we all just want to know that we
matter. We want validation. We want the same things. We want safety and we
want to live a long life. We want to find somebody to love. Stedman, thank
you. We want to find somebody to laugh with and have the power and the
place to cry with when necessary.
The greatest pain in life is to be invisible. What I've learned is that we
all just want to be heard. And I thank all the people who continue to let
me hear your stories, and by sharing your stories, you let other people
see themselves and for a moment, glimpse the power to change and the power
to triumph.
Maya Angelou said, 'When you learn, teach. When you get, give.' I want you
to know that this award to me means that I will continue to strive to give
back to the world what it has given to me, so that I might even be more
worthy of tonight's honor.
Thank you."
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54th Annual EMMY Awards Famous Speech by Oprah Winfrey
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