While I take inspiration from the past, like most Americans, I live for the future.
The preservation of parks, wilderness, and wildlife has also aided liberty by keeping alive the 19th century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West. Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destructive trespass of pollution. In our own time, the nearly universal appreciation of these preserved landscapes, restored waters, and cleaner air through outdoor recreation is a modern expression of our freedom and leisure to enjoy the wonderful life that generations past have built for us.
The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back. There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country.
If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.
We stand together as we did two centuries ago, One people under God determined that our future shall be worthy of our past.
[Our goal] is to help revive America's traditional values: faith, family, neighborhood, work and freedom. Government has no business enforcing these values but neither must it seek, as it did in the recent past, to suppress or replace them. That only robbed us of our tiller and set us adrift. Helping to restore these values will bring new strength, direction and dignity to our lives and to the life of our nation. It's on these values that we'll best build our future.
Until now has there ever been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together? There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.
Don't let the doom criers and the cynics persuade you that the best is past.
I do not want to go back to the past; I want to go back to the past way of facing the future.
They don't worship at the altar of forced busing and mandatory quotas. They don't believe you can remedy past discrimination by mandating new discrimination. (Defending his nominees for Civil Rights Commission)
By emphasizing the importance of a common language, we safeguard a proud legacy and help to ensure that America's future will be as great as her past.
The things that unite us-America's past of which we are so proud, our hopes and aspirations for the future of the world and this much loved country-these things far outweigh what little divides us.
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