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Sher's Blog Archive Hits This is What Treason Really Looks Like, Ann White House Prayer Meetings as a Substitute for Ethical Behavior This Ain't Your Grandma's Party! Sher's Ratios: Sex to Scandal and Mischief to Money Fourth Grade Economics Midterm My Pitch to the Club for Growth
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Abe Speaks The leading object of government is to lift artificial weights from all shoulders to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. 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 hearth-stone, 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. With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. The Gettysburg Address: Click here for the Karl Rove version. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? While the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity. The President last night had a dream. He was in a party of plain people and as it became known who he was they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said, “He is a common-looking man.” The President replied, “Common-looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.” Truth is generally the best vindication against slander. If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.
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