Working Together for a Better Future
© 2014 ReadWorks®, Inc. All rights reserved.
Working Together for a Better Future
Excerpt from President Richard M. Nixon’s First Inaugural Address (1969)
I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power,
we celebrate the unity that keeps us free.
Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as
moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.
This can be such a moment.
Forces now are converging that make possible, for the first time, the hope that many of man’s
deepest aspirations can at last be realized. The spiraling pace of change allows us to
contemplate, within our own lifetime, advances that once would have taken centuries.
In throwing wide the horizons of space, we have discovered new horizons on earth.
For the first time, because the people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world
are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace.
Eight years from now America will celebrate its 200th anniversary as a nation. Within the
lifetime of most people now living, mankind will celebrate that great new year which comes
only once in a thousand years—the beginning of the third millennium.
Working Together for a Better Future
© 2014 ReadWorks®, Inc. All rights reserved.
What kind of nation we will be, what kind of world we will live in, whether we shape the future
in the image of our hopes, is ours to determine by our actions and our choices.
The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons
America—the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that
high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization.
If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment,
that we helped make the world safe for mankind.
This is our summons to greatness.
I believe the American people are ready to answer this call.
The second third of this century has been a time of proud achievement. We have made
enormous strides in science and industry and agriculture. We have shared our wealth more
broadly than ever. We have learned at last to manage a modern economy to assure its
continued growth.
We have given freedom new reach, and we have begun to make its promise real for black as
well as for white.
We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today. I know America’s youth. I believe in them.
We can be proud that they are better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by
conscience than any generation in our history.
No people has ever been so close to the achievement of a just and abundant society, or so
possessed of the will to achieve it. Because our strengths are so great, we can afford to
appraise our weaknesses with candor and to approach them with hope.
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