Ken Burns

But we don't even have to look at the big ideas that we're supposed to be protecting because if you look at those big ideas, you begin to understand even further the complexity and the beauty

You have to go into fiction.

You have to go into William Shakespeare to see all that.

Yeah, you know what?

It manifested, I think I'm quite lucky, it manifested less as a challenge, it is always a challenge, than exhilaration.

The idea that information could be delivered in a way that I wouldn't or you wouldn't speak it suddenly becomes, I mean, Lincoln didn't go around saying four score and seven years ago.

He was just trying to ask you to think about 87 years in a different way.

That's all.

And it was a great rhetorical device, like four score and seven.

So you have to do the math yourself.

He's got you as you're doing the math.

You're paying attention and you've been sucked in and you begin to understand.

And so what you find in all of these, parsing the last sentence of the first inaugural, taking the Declaration of Independence, a few phrases past the pursuit of happiness.

We can get to that, which is great.

really loaded and wonderful, particularly for today.

He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

Maybe you've read it at the picnic on the 4th of July and just let it go over.

Think about what he's saying.

He says, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable.

Not hard to parse.