(August 20, 2017 at 12:50 am)Minimalist Wrote: The close of Lincoln's First Inaugural address March 4, 1861
Quote:In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it."
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Can you imagine the semi-literate buffoon we have in there now even reading, let alone writing, such words?
Only if we replaced whatever it is that passes for a brain in his skull
Seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy -- myself.
Inuit Proverb
Inuit Proverb