I like to read........

.........it entertains, sooths, inspires, moves
my soul.

My mother instilled that within me, I think. Also my father, who would come in of an evening after the days work was done and supper finished, and sit in his chair and read the paper and any one of the farming magazines or perhaps Sports Afield, because he loved the out of doors and hunting.

But since I was very young and not old enough to labor in the fields, or tramp thru the woods then, I first learned to read from my mother and the teachers at our school. I was good at it, by damn, and it was encouraged and looked on with favor. Besides, I learned quickly that by being able to read well and retain what I had read, I was able to do well in my lessons. Not that I always got the best grades because...........
...well, because I was lazy, if you must know the truth of the matter.

But, I did well enough, I suppose.

Back then, in the age of dinosaurs, we were taught some strange things. After all, this was before the digital watch, when the computers of the times filled whole buildings, and the term 'bug in your compute' meant that a fly or cockroach had shorted out one of about a bazillion glass vacuum tubes.

Strange, weird, demonic things we did learn back in those pre-civilized days, when boys wore greased back ducktail haircuts, and girls still wore dresses with poodles on them and white bobby socks, and wore their hair up in a pony tail.

These things and my love of reading remain within me. I'll sometimes read something that I have read many times before and find a truth that time and people have tried to change and I'll be reminded of one of the things that probably make up a part of what I am.

Tonight was such a time. Something that is now so much a part of me that any deviation of it grates on my nerves like the scratching of fingernails on a green blackboard hanging on the wall of my old classrooms.

I'm going to put up a quote here from a famous speech, and I'll give a gracious and hearty well done to anyone who can tell me who gave the speech. It's very famous, millions of people have heard it or read it, so this should be easy for the readers out there in the ether. All 10 or so of you. Feel free to ask anyone you know to help you, I'll give them the same Well Done. If you don't know, and have a real desire to know, I'll share with you. But, only after real effort to come up with the answer yourself.

Quote;
I ask this audience again who of you are going to be great? Says a young man: "I am going to be great." "When are you going to be great?" "When I am elected to some political office." Won't you learn the lesson, young man; that it is prima facie evidence of littleness to hold public office under our form of government? Think of it. This is a government of the people, and by the people, and for the people, and not for the officeholder, and if the people in this country rule as they always should rule, an officeholder is only the servant of the people, and the Bible says that "the servant cannot be greater than his master."

The Bible says that "he that is sent cannot be greater than he who sent him." In this country the people are the masters, and the officeholders can never be greater than the people; they should be honest servants of the people, but they are not our greatest men. Young man, remember that you never heard of a great man holding any political office in this country unless he took that office at an expense to himself. It is a loss to every great man to take a public office in our country. Bear this in mind, young man, that you cannot be made great by a political election.
Endquote

I sincerely hope that thousands of people can give me the answer.......

...before the kudzu starts growing in the spring.