What is your favorite speech from history?

I have many but I’ve recently re-read this favorite of mine – Andrea Dworkin’s 1983 speech. “And on that day, that day of truce, that day when not one woman is raped, we will begin the real practice of equality, because we can’t begin it before that day.” – amen. (though I’d switch ‘woman’ to ‘person’ but that’s me.)

Another place where it is hard to pick one, but if I had to, it would be Robert F. Kennedy’s 1966 Day of Affirmation speech.

Um, Frederick Douglas really laced into ‘em. July 4, 1852
Hoo boy! This one gets my vote for the all time great unpalatable truth telling that people did not want to hear.

The first that came to mind was Chief Joseph’s “I Will Fight No More Forever”. I carried it on a slip of paper in my notebook in high school (we read it during a rhetoric course.) It reminds me of why I must remain a pacifist.

“I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohulhulsote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead.

It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.

Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”

winston churchill’s eve of d day radio address

Every single one that should have been uttered but never was because there was shit that needed to be done.

JFK’s speech where he basically lifted america up and motivated us to do things like go to the moon (“We won’t do this things because they are easy but because they are hard!”)

Gettysburg Address is an obvious one.

I’ll get grief for it I’m sure, but Obama’s speech to the DNC convention back in 2004.

Hard to leave I have a dream out.

given time i’m sure i could find plenty more.

edit… “Mr Gorbechev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL”

I can’t pick just one. Here are three of my favorites.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
MacAuthur’s I Shall Return.
King’s I Have a Dream.

http://youtu.be/2Im1Ct3lf00 Okay strictly speaking not a speech, more a catalogue of gaffes.It’s a bit long but you get the overalll feel pretty quickly. All hail Quayle…... Sheesh!! :¬)

“Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth

History
Gettysburg Address – Abraham Lincoln, November 19th, 1863; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
We Shall Fight on the Beaches – Winston Churchill, June 4th, 1940; House of Commons, London
Their Finest Hour – Winston Churchill, June 18th, 1940; House of Commons, London
We choose to go to the Moon – September 12, 1962; Rice University Stadium, Houston TX
Inaugural Address – John F. Kennedy, January 20th, 1961; Washington D.C.

Movies (not History, but His Story)
25th Hour (2002) – ’Fuck You’ speech, Edward Norton
Henry V (1989) – Saint Crispin’s Day, Kenneth Branagh
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) – Motivational visit, Alec Baldwin
Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Boot camp welcome, R. Lee Ermey
Pulp Fiction (1994), Ezekiel 25.17, Samuel Jackson