A Quote by Barack Obama
We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.
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We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.
Most Americans believe in fairness; we believe that people should work hard but there should be a safety net. We believe in saving the quality of our air and water for our children. Most Americans want action on climate change. You can just go through the list. Most Americans believe in progressive taxation.
Why should we put ourselves out of our way to do anything for posterity? For what has posterity ever done for us?
Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves an essential spiritual and ethical question: Are we the kind of people who take everything for ourselves and leave nothing for others, or do the angels of our better nature still live? I believe the angels are still alive.
We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.
Religion, in its most general view, is such a Sense of God in the soul, and such a conviction of our obligations to him, and of our dependence upon him, as shall engage us to make it our great care to conduct ourselves in a manner which we have reason to believe will be pleasing to him.
There are some who ask us to believe that if we want the best of times for ourselves, the fit and the fortunate, then we'll just have to learn to live with the worst of times for millions of other Americans - that we're doomed to be a nation of the lucky and the left-out. I don't believe it. My mother didn't believe it. Your ancestors didn't believe it. And I don't think you should believe it.
While as black people we've paid for our right to be in this country many, many times over, I still can't help but feel we psychologically still see ourselves as outsiders. I believe this is our country. As such we need to embrace it fully.
We compromise ourselves the day we are born. If we are looking for the original sin, there it is- our incapacity to live honestly with ourselves because we are human, because we are shackled by custom, by obligations and we accept compromise only in the light of our conscience, answerable as we are only to ourselves.
All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.
We shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life of the majority.
When we protect our children in their schools or on our streets, we are living up to our obligations - obligations which we should take solemnly.
A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us.
Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.
Our country is still young and its potential is still enormous. We should remember, as we look toward the future, that the more fully we believe in and achieve freedom and equal opportunity - not simply for ourselves but for others - the greater our accomplishments as a nation will be.
Sir, very few people reach posterity. Who amongst us may arrive at that destination I presume not to vaticinate. Posterity is a most limited assembly. Those gentlemen who reach posterity
are not much more numerous than the planets.
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