Ken Burns

There's a wonderful moment when John Adams, who's the big worrier of the revolution, he's always worrying.

He's saying, I just don't know if there's enough virtue to have a republic.

Everybody is so ambitious and so greedy and so out to do this.

And so for him, if you were going to create this new thing, something new under the sun, you know, the world started over again, as Thomas Paine is suggesting, an asylum for mankind, he called it.

then maybe you had to figure out how to educate your stuff.

And so when you go back and say, what have we lost?

We're now just repeating, are we trying to get to the test?

Are we trying to make a well-rounded human being?

So if I tell you,

In 1838, there is this lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, who is just a few days short of his 29th birthday, who is addressing the young man's Lyceum on an afternoon.

And the topic is foreign policy.

And he says, when shall we expect the approach of danger?

Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us with a blow?

Then he answered his own question.

Never.

All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.

As a nation of free men, we shall live through all time or die by suicide.

Whoa.

You know who said that?