"Attention! Please... attention! Ahem! Attention to the All-Powerful John the 801st!"

"Uh... some odd score and seven years ago our mothers brought forth to this... place a new nation, made in...um... and... dedicated.... yes... dedicated to the prop-.. proposition that all fuzzy pink animals are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a civil war, not at all like that one that was there in that one place, all that time ago, testing whether that nation or any nation so made and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a replica of a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, well, in this replica of that field, as a final resting-place for those who gave their lives that that nation, so made and dedicated, might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. I promise you. I asked my mum. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave and cowardly men, living and dead who struggled here, or rather, not here, but on the place not the replica, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract, although I will certainly try to add something to it. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. What did they do here, anyway?

"It is rather for us who had the sense to keep living that this place is dedicated. Here is the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far advanced. It is for us to be given the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new respect for farmers, that we will ridicule the absolute truth, that we will exploit the poor and reward laziness, and that a perversion of government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."