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1、精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文 -全程指导写作 独家原创 1 / 11The Great SocietyLyndon Baines Johnson: “The Great Society”President Hatcher, Governor Romney, Senators McNamara and Hart, Congressmen Meader and Staebler, and other members of the fine Michigan delegation, members of the graduating class, my fellow American
2、s:It is a great pleasure to be here today. This university has been coeducational since 1870, but I do not believe it was on the basis of your accomplishments that a Detroit high school girl said (and I quote), “In choosing a college, you first have to decide whether you want a coeducational school
3、or an educational school.” Well, we can find both here at Michigan, although perhaps at different hours. I came out here today very anxious to meet the Michigan student whose father told a friend of mine that his sons education had been a real value. It stopped his mother from bragging about him.I h
4、ave come today from the turmoil of your capital to the tranquility of your campus to speak 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文 -全程指导写作 独家原创 2 / 11about the future of your country. The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people.
5、 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
6、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.Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society
7、where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文 -全程指导写作 独家原创 3 / 11f
8、or all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.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
9、 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
10、 honors creation for its own sake and for what is 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
11、 work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文 -全程指导写作 独家原创 4 / 11labor.So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society in our cities, i
12、n our countryside, and in our classrooms.Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans fourfifths 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
13、and highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States.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
14、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 e
15、xpansion is 精品文档2016 全新精品资料-全新公文范文 -全程指导写作 独家原创 5 / 11eroding these precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference.And 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 wi
