Radio National, a program produced by The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), invited listeners to name the greatest speech of all time, to which 6000 Australians responded.
As with all such things, global geographical location will certainly influence
1: the options to consider; and
2: the final result.
It will also be subject to widely differing opinions about the worthiness of the final selection, specially where religion, or politics may strongly influence a person's view, regarding either a particular speech or the person delivering it.
So what makes the following selection of speeches "great"?
According to Judith Brett, “A great speech must live, circulate and live beyond the moment of its delivery.”
The following speeches can be described and catagorised as follows:
Elizabeth’s, Henry’s and Churchill’s speeches are calls to arms. Three come from Americans destined to be assassinated. And one might add Whitlam to that list (having been politically assassinated by John Kerr in 1975). Jesus? Well, he was on his way to Golgotha.
Apart from doomed people delivering many of these speeches, the speeches also address doomed projects. Peter Jensen indicated that Keating’s speech did not produced it's promised breadth and depth of reconciliation, and Martin Luther King’s "Dream" is still far from realised.
I was originally alerted to this list by the Phillip Adams "Opinion" Report in the online edition of The Australian, 5 May, 2007.
Since then, I have collected these speeches and put them altogether here as a one stop resource partly for EFL/ESL use, but mostly for my own interest in such things.
Alternatively you can hunt them down via the web, which lists many, many sources for these speeches.
I hope you enjoy them.
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