Words to Contemplate on Memorial Day

"Forescore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived inliberty, and dedicated to the propisition 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...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 for 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 their 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 the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. "

Gettysburg Address of Abraham Lincoln



Readings of the Gettysburg Address by actors Sam Waterson, Jeff Daniels; musician Johnny Cash and actor Jim Getty:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gettysburgaddress.htm