We’ve had several threads on this board about speeches or monologues from plays/movies/etc. How about real-world speeches? Which bits of speechifying from a politician, or activist, or what have you, make you want to go out and give your all for The Cause to this day? (Note: For the purposes of this thread, let’s stick to historical speeches, and try to avoid contemporary politics. Say, no more recent than fifty years.)
David Lange was one of New Zealand’s finest statesman and IMHO our best Prime Minister. He was a quick wit and fantastic with words, and one of his most memorable moments was the Oxford Union Debate in 1985.
Lange had the unenviable task of taking on the Rev. Jerry Falwell and arguing that “Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible” For those that don’t remember New Zealand was at the forefront of protests to stop nuclear testing in the South Pacific and in 1984 banned nuclear armed ships from entering her waters.
Here is the speech: the entire transcript and audio available on the public address link. You really need to listen to the whole thing…
I think the Gettysburg Address is masterful and unsurpassed among American political speeches. I also love Churchill’s “Fight them on the beaches” speech.
Are you placing a historical limit? Because Cicero’s speeches, particularly In Catalinam, are very good, but the record we have is not what he actually said, but a dressed-up version.
I’d prefer speeches that are at least fifty years old, to avoid contemporary political wrangling. (Though the NZ link was very interesting). I think Cicero (or his ghostwriter) qualifies.
Although the aforementioned Gettysburg Address is the best surviving example, and one of the best speeches in the English language, his first has moments of genius, perhaps overshadowed by density and bureaucratic language. His second inaugural was much better.
I also like his best-known “Message to Congress”: “we shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
But Lincoln fans might be missing his very best work. Lincoln’s famous Lost Speech in 1856 was reportedly so good that trained reporters stopped taking notes and sat open-mouthed. The other possibility rumored is that it was so polarizing that it was suppressed for the good of a nation on the brink of civil war. We may never know exactly why the speech was lost. But all who attended spoke forever afterward in awe of this speech:
Lincoln’s friend Herndon concluded, “His speech was full of fire and energy and force. It was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, and right set ablaze by the devine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath.”
I would love to have that speech to share with you here.
I remember hearing on NPR a few years ago that there is no reliable transcript of the speech. Everyone covering the speech was too overcome with emotion to write down what was spoken, and the voice recording at the time was bad or lost.
I’m not a sports fan, and I am fighting off tears just reading the speech.
E.T.A. The link is to a post in a forum which is fairly obviously biased to Irish nationalism but I couldn’t find the full text of the speech anywhere else
Pop-up warning here, but here is American Rhetoric’s list of the top 100 speeches of the 20th Century. Many of these fall inside the OP’s 50-year limit, and I certainly haven’t read every one, but there’s much to admire regardless of politics and religion. The King speeches are obviously magnificient, but I’d suggest Reagan’s Challenger address and Clinton’s remarks after the Oklahoma City bombing for recent examples. There’s other stuff in there that is momentous but not great oratory and not particularly truthful either, but still.
He got a standing ovation after this adn then went to his private quarterrs and despaired that the times allowed for a man to get a standing ovation for sending men of to kill and be killed.
One of the links on that page is to Mario Savio’s speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in particular, this part, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it – that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!”
It’s remarkable as it comes from a non-politician and for being apparently extemporaneous.
Lincoln is my favorite (never knew about that lost speech…very cool albeit sad it is lost to us). Churchill certainly gets an honorable mention.
Reaching a little farther afield I’ll toss out Ralph Waldo Emerson’s commencement address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837 titled: The American Scholar
I really think the speech needs to be read in its entirety for best effect. Here is a little taste and link to the full speech:
The speech Bartolomeo Vanzetti made in 1927 at his sentencing to death for his participation with Nicola Sacco in an armed robberry that resulted in two deaths is the most moving words I have ever read. When it came time for his final words, this semi-literate workman was poetic.
I was moved when I read it 55 years ago and thought he was innocent and I am still moved by it today even though I now think he was guilty.
I like Robert Kennedy’s speech after MLK was assassinated. The most amazing part of the speech is the fact that he made a speech at all. Right after MLK is assassinated he goes out and talks to a crowd that could get hostile and dangerous if he says the wrong thing. He gives the speech anyway and no violence broke out in Indianapolis while violence broke out in other cities around the country.
My favorite speech is the “Cross of Gold” speech delivered by William Jennings Bryan on July 9, 1896, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I like it more for its background (same as the Kennedy speech) than for its words. Bryan was probably America’s first politician to truly champion the cause of populism. There was a populist uprising in America by 1896 and most politicians were ignoring its cause, which was to have money backed by silver. Probably a bad idea, but no even listened to the lower classes back then.
So while the silver supporters were walking around the Democratic Convention not expecting anything to happen, in walks Bryan and tells them exactly what they wanted to hear.
I’ve read that Bryan didn’t actually care that much about the gold standard, and that speech certainly didn’t help him get elected any of the three times he tried.
