This, then, is the state of the union: free and restless, growing and full of hope. So it was in the beginning. So it shall always be, while God is willing, and we are strong enough to keep the faith.

This line comes from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address delivered in the U.S. Capitol during the mid-1960s, when his administration was pressing an ambitious domestic agenda (the Great Society) alongside escalating Cold War pressures and the deepening conflict in Vietnam. In the address, Johnson uses the constitutional ritual of reporting on “the state of the union” to frame the nation’s condition not merely in economic or military terms but as a continuing civic project—“free and restless” and oriented toward growth. The closing cadence (“So it was… So it shall always be…”) deliberately echoes founding-era continuity and invokes religious language to underscore moral resolve and national unity.

Johnson recasts the required constitutional report into a statement of national character. “Free and restless” suggests that liberty in America is inseparable from motion—argument, reform, ambition, and dissatisfaction with injustice or stagnation. “Growing and full of hope” turns that restlessness into a forward-looking virtue rather than a symptom of instability. The parallel sentences (“So it was… So it shall always be…”) claim continuity with the nation’s origins while making endurance conditional: the future depends on providence (“while God is willing”) and on civic strength (“we are strong enough to keep the faith”). The “faith” here is less doctrinal religion than commitment to democratic ideals and collective responsibility.