Best real-world speeches?

[Paul_in_Qatar]

Daladier’s speech to the Republic on the eve of WWII.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Nazi%27s_Aim_is_Slavery

[Quartz]

Cicero’s speeches Against Verres.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Lakai

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.

I like this speech because although it was completely ad lib or impromptu, it was eloquent. He subtly reminds the audience of his own brother’s death and quotes Aeschylus without sounding pretentious. It’s sad that we also lost him that year, as he would have been a great statesman.

[Lakai]

@Captain_Carrot

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.

Very True. That doesn’t change the fact that he championed a cause of the people that went against big business. Before 1896 people asking for help from the government were virtually ignored. Even though Bryan failed, this was the first time that poor people got help when they asked for it. Their movement was a prerequisite for what would come in the 1930’s. That would be the first time when a politician would succeeded in getting laws passed to help them.

The moment is very poignant for me because despite Bryan’s intentions, it was the spark ended up giving the lower classes real political power.

[NinjaChick]

Dr. King’s “I Have A Dream” absolutely belongs on any list of best speeches, and I’m also glad to see this on a list of greats.

I will forever have a soft spot for Sojourner Truth’s beautifully succinct Ain’t I a Woman speech, especially this bit:

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

And of course - maybe just because I’m a tremendous nerd, I don’t know - there’s this:

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

[Moirai]

A graduation address delivered by Steve Jobs a few years ago is available on YouTube, I think- found it a while back and it’s stunning.

[GorillaGirl]

Neither of these are 50 years old, but I especially like Barbara Jordan’s 1974 speech to the House Judiciary Committee on Richard Nixon’s impeachment, and Ann Richard’s 1988 Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention.

[Red_Skeezix]

One I’ve always liked, a good invective delivered on the Fourth of July by Frederick Douglass “The Hypocrisy of American Slavery”.

@Frederick Douglass

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

[astro]

The Cornerstone Speech which laid out the case for the south to secede and justified slavery.

Not a great speech from a moral perspective, but still an absolutely remarkable bit of extemporaneous speaking.