Quotes & Sayings About Gettysburg Address

The first time I heard Ron Whitehead read I felt what I imagine those who heard Abraham Lincoln deliver The Gettysburg Address felt. — David Amram

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address - while every night it takes six guys to write this crap! — David Letterman

I think that in our earlier history
the Gettysburg Address or something
there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it. — Marilynne Robinson

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out 'It's a Small World After All,' flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren — Sarah Vowell

I wanted to be accepted. It must have been in sixth grade. It was just before the Fourth of July. They were trying out students for this patriotic play. I wanted to do Abe Lincoln, so I learned the Gettysburg Address inside and out. I'd be out in the fields pickin' the crops and I'd be memorizin'. I was the only one who didn't have to read the part, 'cause I learned it. The part was given to a girl who was a grower's daughter. She had to read it out of a book, but they said she had better diction. I was very disappointed. I quit about eighth grade. Any time anybody'd talk to me about politics, about civil rights, I would ignore it. It's a very degrading thing because you can't express yourself. They wanted us to speak English in the school classes. We'd put out a real effort. I would get into a lot of fights because I spoke Spanish and they couldn't understand it. I was punished. I was kept after school for not speaking English. — Studs Terkel

What did The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Uncle Tom's Cabin and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and all that have to do with our present enthusiasm for women's rights? Not that much, really. Women just got lucky this time. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience. — Neil Postman

We all know the Lincoln of the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. We need to know the Lincoln of the Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society and of the Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions, both talks in which he vents his favorite enthusiasms. We need to understand his thirst for economic and industrial development. We need to realize that he was a lawyer for corporations, a vigorous advocate of property rights, and a defender of an "elitist" economics against the unreflective populist bromides of his age. We need to focus on his love for the Founders as guides to the American future. We need to grapple with his ferocious ambition, personal and political. — Rich Lowry

As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address. — Jeremy Denk

The nation was founded and "dedicated," to use Lincoln's language in the "Gettysburg Address," to equality as a "self-evident truth." But this very principle of equality, as Lincoln also noted, was a "proposition." To make it a reality remained "the unfinished work" of Americans. — Ronald Takaki

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. — Ernest Hemingway,

So you're saying you do want to sleep
with me?"
"Given the fact that I just took my millionth
cold shower since I've moved in here and
I have to constantly recite the Gettysburg
Address and The Bill of Rights in my head
when I'm around you? Yeah, I'd say so.
Why, you want me, too? — Chelsea M. Cameron

At least as coherent as the Gettysburg Address backwards in Albanian, anyway. — Norman Spinrad

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.
- President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address, November 19, 1863 — Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most loved president of the United States, was also the most criticized president. Probably no politician in history had worse things said about him. Here's how the Chicago Times in 1865 evaluated Lincoln's Gettysburg Address the day after he delivered it: "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dish-watery utterances of a man who has been pointed out to intelligent foreigners as President of the United States." Time, of course, has proved this scathing criticism wrong. 9. — John C. Maxwell

To most readers the word 'fiction' is an utter fraud. They are entirely convinced that each character has an exact counterpart in real life and that any small discrepancy with that counterpart is a simple error on the author's part. Consequently, they are totally at a loss if anything essential is altered. Make Abraham Lincoln a dentist, put the Gettysburg Address on his tongue, and nobody will recognize it. — Louis Auchincloss

The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle — Arthur Quinn

One unexpectedly striking moment, when Tom Amandes as Lincoln, recites the Gettysburg Address, not in booming, this-is-a-great-speech style, but casually, as if chatting over dinner. The approach elevates the words. — Neil Genzlinger

I said, have you seen your butt?"
"Is that a rhetorical question?" I craned my neck to take a gander at my backside.
Chloe clarified, "She means you have 'boy toy' written across the back of your jeans."
"Oh." I nodded. "They're Josh's."
"You say that as if it explains everything." She cocked her head to one side and considered me while buttoning her cardigan. "My stepbrothers dont write 'boy toy' across the back of their jeans.They only say the entire alphabet while burping."
"That's nothing.Josh can recite the Gettysburg Address. — Jennifer Echols

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, given November 19, 1863 on the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA — Abraham Lincoln

[H]e quoted eloquently from the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and a section which had been stricken from his party's platform seventy-five years ago. He was not quite clear on what all this had to do with [the present situation], but it was noble and stirring and would bring in a lot of votes. — Mark Clifton

A recent government publication on the marketing of cabbage contains, according to one report, 26,941 words. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Gettysburg Address contains a mere 279 words while the Lord's Prayer comprises but 67. — Norman Ralph Augustine

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that? — Roy H. Williams

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:

Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
— John DeFrancis

The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words. — David McIntosh

Same difference," he said. "The South lost and the North won. Abraham Lincoln came and gave the Emancipation Proclamation."
"The Gettysburg Address," Mrs. Anderson said. "The Emancipation Proclamation was delivered six months before the battle."
He gave an exaggerated sigh. "Who's giving the report here?"
She waved her hand. "Proceed then."
"Like I said, the North won. The slaves were all freed. Hurrah, hurrah. The end. — J.M. Darhower