A man does not hope for the
thing that he does not believe in, and if some of us have forgotten what
America believed in, you, at any rate, imported in your own hearts a
renewal of the belief. That is the reason that I, for one, make you
welcome. If I have in any degree forgotten what America was intended
for, I will thank God if you will remind me. I was born in America. You
dreamed dreams of what America was to be, and I hope you brought the
dreams with you. No man that does not see visions will ever realize any
high hope or undertake any high enterprise. Just because you brought
dreams with you, America is more likely to realize dreams such as you
brought. You are enriching us if you came expecting us to be better than
we are.
See, my friends, what that means. It means that Americans must have a
consciousness different from the consciousness of every other nation in
the world. I am not saying this with even the slightest thought of
criticism of other nations. You know how it is with a family. A family
gets centered on itself if it is not careful and is less interested in
the neighbors than it is in its own members.
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