US Presidential Inaugural Addresses eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 452 pages of information about US Presidential Inaugural Addresses.

US Presidential Inaugural Addresses eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 452 pages of information about US Presidential Inaugural Addresses.
January 21, 1957
John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Friday, January 20, 1961
Lyndon Baines Johnson, Inaugural Address, Wednesday, January 20, 1965
Richard Milhous Nixon, First Inaugural Address, Monday, January 20, 1969
Richard Milhous Nixon, Second Inaugural Address, Saturday, January 20, 1973
Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, Thursday, January 20, 1977
Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural Address, Tuesday, January 20, 1981
Ronald Reagan, Second Inaugural Address, Monday, January 21, 1985
George Bush, Inaugural Address, Friday, January 20, 1989
Bill Clinton, First Inaugural Address, Wednesday, January 21, 1993
Bill Clinton, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1997
George W. Bush, First Inaugural Address, Saturday, January 20, 2001
George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Address, Thursday, January 20, 2005

***

George Washington
First Inaugural Address
Thursday, April 30, 1789

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives: 

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.  On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years—­a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.  On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.  In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected.  All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

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US Presidential Inaugural Addresses from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.