Best speeches of all-time

[Popinjay]

From movies to wars to peace protests what is your favorite speech of all-time?

Name it and quote a part of it that is especially badass. I'm studying the civil rights movement and MLK's I have a dream speech is just insanely good. I would quote from it but I love it all.

[El Ishmael]

Linky.

[diebitter]

Churchill, near the start of the war when it looked very bleak for Britain, France was falling, and an invasion looked imminent:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..."


Churchill at the fall of France:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'


And Churchill, during the blitz:

We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best."

[spamuell]

It's a cliché but Pericles' Funeral Oration.

[ericd]

Gettysburg Address

[samjjones]

Those Churchill speeches are great.

[pokerdirty]

[diebitter]

There's a few more that are moving, but I didn't want to overdo it. There's one more that deserves special mention though, about the few fighter pilots that managed, unbelievably, to hold off the Luftwaffe and cripple the invasion plans. Here's an excert:

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day…


Boy, we were lucky buggers to have Churchill on point.

[JimHammer]

"Well, I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curveball, high fiber, good scotch... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, I believe there ought to be a Constitutional ammendment outlawing astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents on Christmas morning rather than on Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days."

- Crash Davis

[xadrez]

"Do you know what its like to fall in the mud and get KICKED, IN THE HEAD, WITH AN IRON BOOT"