Twenty scores and ten years ago, our fathers brought forth upon 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 test of that proposition - not merely of our own nation’s endurance, but of its soul.

We are met here not to dedicate a field of battle, but to consider a far more difficult labor: to see if this nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure by the means it chooses to defend itself.

The world watches, and the universe, in its silent, boundless compassion, watches also. It asks not whether we can strike with fury, but whether we have the wisdom to see that in the enemy, as in the friend, there burns the same spark of suffering, the same longing for peace.

A patriot, sir, is not one who simply shouts for his country, but one who weeps for it. A patriot does not ask, “How can I make our power felt?” but rather, “How can I make our principles live?”

For a nation founded on the radical idea of equality cannot maintain that idea by unleashing suffering upon the children of another land, who were born into a different creed but share the same breath of life.

To be a patriot is to serve what is best for America - and what is best for America is not its capacity for destruction, but its fidelity to the truth that no man, and no nation, is an island.

The Dharma teaches that hatred never ceases by hatred; that it ceases only by love. This is the ancient law. To pour bombs into the cradle of ancient civilizations is not strength; it is to plant the very seeds of discord we claim to oppose.

We are called, in this hour, to a higher patriotism. A patriotism that finds its courage not in the roar of engines of war, but in the quiet, resolute work of pulling two hands apart before they become fists. It is a patriotism that understands that the security of our borders is ultimately found in the justice of our actions.

It is, in the end, for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they who came before so nobly advanced. That work is not conquest.

It is the unending, difficult, sacred work of extending liberty - not through the sword, but through the patient demonstration that a nation can be both powerful and merciful.

Let us resolve that this great nation, under the enduring law of cause and effect, shall have a new birth of wisdom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth, but shall strive to be, for all of humanity, a lamp unto the feet, and a light unto the path.

Abraham Lincoln,
From The Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.