A Quote by David Letterman

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!
A great presidential address - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Truman's Farewell Address, Kennedy's Inaugural Address - has the power to inspire.
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.
Lincoln's address at Gettysburg - 272 words dedicating a cemetery at the site of one of the Civil War's bloodiest battles - has been called by scholars the source of all modern political prose.
When I went to an Aspen seminar on "American Scriptures" - the bicentennial of the Declaration and they discussed the preamble and the Gettysburg Address and much more, but not Lincoln's Second Inauguration, I challenged that omission and they said find something on it and to my astonishment, at that time, there was no book or long article that really did it. So I wrote one that attempted to do it justice. Although obscurely published, that essay got a nice bounce. Somehow David Donald saw it, and in his notes to his biography singled it out.
One hundred and fifty years after Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, equality for many Americans remains elusive.
I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
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.
If you look at photos of the Gettysburg Address there's a guy off to the right who I think is Keith Richards.
At least George W. Bush feels like - and I've heard him say it - "You can't judge me now, because look at Abraham Lincoln. When he was in the middle of that war and 600,000 people died, he was vilified for the Gettysburg Address because they felt it was too short and almost insulting, and now you look back and it's considered one of the great speeches of all time and he's considered one of the great presidents of all time."
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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
The first time I heard Ron Whitehead read I felt what I imagine those who heard Abraham Lincoln deliver The Gettysburg Address felt.
it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.
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?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, please paint me the Gettysburg Address.
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.
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