In honor of Obamas Inauguration

Everyone is talking about it.

You can’t flip the TV or radio on without hearing about it.  As you open your internet browser you see the red, white and blue reminding us all of a historical event we are all going to witness tomorrow.

In honor of Obama’s inauguration, I would like to post some of my favorite quotes from past inaugural speeches.  They are in no particular order, and I assure you, you’ve heard one which is very famous, at least twice in your life.

I will though, start off with one of my favorites:

The greatest progress we have made, and the greatest progress we have yet to make, is in the human heart. In the end, all the world’s wealth and a thousand armies are no match for the strength and decency of the human spirit.  Bill Clinton

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. Abraham Lincoln

Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. Thomas Jefferson

Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole course of these transactions, I first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party animosity, I read it with great satisfaction, as the result of good heads prompted by good hearts, as an experiment better adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or suggested. John Adams

My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.  John F. Kennedy

(yes, I know…ironically enough, he did say this in his speech)  A person can be expected to act responsibly only if he has responsibility. This is human nature. So let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves. Let us locate responsibility in more places.” Richard Nixon

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to ourselves — to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the right exalted. Woodrow Wilson

Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Theodore Roosevelt

Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land. Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of station, race, or calling. Dwight Eisenhower

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. Franklin D. Roosevelt

Anyone have any favorites?