LBJ "The Great Society" Speech, 1964

Below I paraphrase my favorite quotes from Lyndon B Johnson's speech at the University of Michigan:

• The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation.
• For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
• The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
• But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
• The three places where we begin to build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. Fifty years from now, there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, and highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled.
• Aristotle said, "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. 
• The catalog of ills is long, there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic.
  Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. 
• Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. 
• Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.
• New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come not only to live, but to live the good life.
• Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
• There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, and your labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
• Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life."

This speech was given 50 years ago. Take a look at the last half century. As a society, have we been moving towards and building upon such ideals that allow a positive culture to flourish?

Source: PBS 

President Clinton Lecture on Public Service

First Lecture by President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University in May 2013.

Below I paraphrase parts of the lecture (it's long!) that resonate with me and fit well with the themes of this blog:

• Twenty-first century citizenship requires us to do some public good as a private citizen - around the corner, or around the world, in public office, or out. Compose a life where service is important. It is important because the world is so interdependent and full of opportunities.
• The world we are living in is clearly unsustainable. There is too much inequality and too much instability.
• Public service work has four requirements. One, you should be obsessively interested in people, especially people who are different from you. You should want to understand them and understand how they perceive the world and understand what they need and what their dreams are. Two, you should care about principles - about the end of all this. What is the purpose of service? What's the role of government, what are the roles of the NGOs, how do you organize this in your mind, why are you doing this? Three, what are the policies that you believe will advance these purposes? And four, what are the politics of the situations? How are you going to turn your good intentions into real changes? People, purpose, policies, and politics. To me, the most important thing is the first.
• This might be my favorite quote of this lecture. I am deeply motivated by people and purpose and these words substantiate my passion for serving people in the realm of urban design. And of course the policies and politics are also important when it comes to planning cities.  
• Most people get in real trouble and abuse power when they forget that the purpose of their power is not to impose their will on others but to let other people be empowered to live their own lives better, or as I always say, to have better stories.
• Don't belittle people who know less than you do or have less than you do... what we have in common in our soul is important.
• Americans are not hearing enough stories from other people, from people are are different from themselves. And it's a big mistake... We have one remaining bigotry in America: we just don't want to be around anybody that disagrees with us. People are organizing massive living patterns in this country around being with somebody that agrees with them.
• The purpose of service is to help other people. Not to make you feel good about yourself, although you will. Not to impose everything you think should be done on other people. But to create a world where we can all live together, because it’s so interdependent. If we don’t, the consequences to us, to our families, to our future will be adverse and severe.
• Every place in the world where they’re trying to cooperate, they’re doing pretty well. Every place in the world that elevate our differences over our common humanity. Where we can no longer hear what people who are different from us are saying, where our ears our closed and minds are more closed – there is trouble. 
• I believe that it’s very important that every person in your generation have a worldview. We need a common understanding of what is the nature of the modern world. What are it’s biggest challenges, opportunities. What evidence do we have about how best we can deal with them.