Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.
Barack Obama

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
Warren Buffett

If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.
Mohandas Gandhi

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.
Walt Disney

Thanks to my mother, not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.
Erma Bombeck

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.
Henry David Thoreau

If I'd had some set idea of a finish line, don't you think I would have crossed it years ago?
Bill Gates

Things that I felt absolutely sure of but a few years ago, I do not believe now. This thought makes me see more clearly how foolish it would be to expect all men to agree with me.
Jim Rohn

I'm not a real movie star. I've still got the same wife I started out with twenty-eight years ago.
Will Rogers

I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.
Anais Nin

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me.
Ansel Adams

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.
John Adams

Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
Les Brown

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
Edgar Allan Poe

I'm not trying to clock scores in this lifetime, it's just that things are better now than they were like five, ten years ago. Music has gotten a lot better. There's a lot of people who are committed to - soulfully.
Jerry Garcia

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University and learned within 24 hours to be ready to speak at the drop of a hat, and I learned something more, the trustees were expected to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Robert Kennedy

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
Meister Eckhart

Back 12 years ago, when Dr. Mathews was president here, we had a plan that when I got ready to quit, we'd bring a certain guy in and he'd take over that day and I'd leave. But as time wore on, I realized that wouldn't have been good at all.
Bear Bryant