riculture.
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.

Standing in this same place a third of a century ago, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt addressed a Nation ravaged by depression and gripped in fear.
He could say in surveying the Nation's troubles: "They concern, thank
God, only material things."

Our crisis today is the reverse.

We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching
with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous
discord on earth.

We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting
unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks
that need doing, waiting for hands to do them.

To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit.

To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.

When we listen to "the better angels of our nature," we find that
they celebrate the simple things, the basic things--such as goodness,
decency, love, kindness.

Greatness comes in simple trappings.

The simple things are the ones most needed today if we are to surmount
what divides us, and cement what unites us.

To lower our voices would be a simple thing.

In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words;
from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from
angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic
rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one
another--until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as
well as our voices.

For its part, government will listen. We will strive to listen in new
ways--to the voices of quiet anguish, the voices that speak without
words, the voices of the heart--to the injured voices, the a