When the earth shook and fires raged in California; when I saw the Mississippi deluge the farmlands of the Midwest in a 500 year flood; when the century’s bitterest cold swept from North Dakota to Newport News it seemed as though the world itself was coming apart at the seams.  But the American people, they just came together.  They rose to the occasion, neighbor helping neighbor, strangers risking life and limb to stay total strangers, showing the better angels of our nature.

Let us not reserve the better angels only for natural disasters, leaving our deepest and most profound problems to petty political fighting.

Let us instead by true to our spirit, facing facts, coming together, bringing hope and moving forward.

Tonight, my fellow Americans, we are summoned to answer a question as old as the republic itself, what is the state of our union?

It is growing stronger but it must be stronger still.  With your help and God’s help it will be.

Thank you and God Bless America.

***

State of the Union Address
William J. Clinton
January 24, 1995

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, members of the 104th Congress, my fellow
Americans: 

Again we are here in the sanctuary of democracy.  And once again, our democracy has spoken.

So let me begin by congratulating all of you here in the 104th Congress, and congratulating you, Mr. Speaker.

If we agree on nothing else tonight, we must agree that the American people certainly voted for change in 1992 and in 1994.

And as I look out at you, I know how some of you must have felt in 1992.

I must say that in both years we didn’t hear America singing, we heard America shouting.  And now all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, must say:  We hear you.  We will work together to earn the jobs you have given us.  For we are the keepers of the sacred trust and we must be faithful to it in this new and very demanding era.

Over 200 years ago, our founders changed the entire course of human history by joining together to create a new country based on a single, powerful idea.  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.  Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It has fallen to every generation since then to preserve that idea—­the American idea—­and to deepen and expand its meaning in new and different times.  To Lincoln and to his Congress, to preserve the Union and to end slavery.  To Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to restrain the abuses and excesses of the Industrial Revolution and to assert our leadership in the world.  To Franklin Roosevelt, to fight the failure and pain of the Great Depression and to win our country’s great struggle against fascism.

And to all our Presidents since, to fight the cold war.  Especially, I recall two who struggled to fight that cold war in partnership with Congresses where the majority was of a different party.  To Harry Truman, who summoned us to unparalleled prosperity at home and who built the architecture of the cold war.  And to Ronald Reagan, whom we wish well tonight, and who exhorted us to carry on until the twilight struggle against Communism was won.