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Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln - 1863
FOURSCORE
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 the 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.
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