Robert De Niro walked onto the stage at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night, where he received loud applause before he recited excerpts from a Philip Glass symphony about Abraham Lincoln. "Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence," the Oscar-winning actor said as he recited a call for civility, as first spoken by Lincoln in 1838. "Let those materials be moulded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.