Surfing the Inner N8

Insights & Outsights from a Guy Trying to Follow Jesus

Great Speeches

Last night I found this really cool website.  After unsuccessfully searching iTunes for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, I found a website where you can download that speech, along with others, at no cost.  It’s called “American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches of the Twentieth Century.”

The website has classics like inaugural speeches by FDR (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and JFK (“ask not what your country can do for you…”), RFK, and other speeches by MLK, like the one he gave on the same night he was killed.

There are lots of great speeches by other people with three initials, one by a fellow with only an initial for a last name (Malcolm X), and even some by people with four names (Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton & Dorothy Ann Willis Richards–but HDRC & DAWR just don’t have that ring to it) so I’d encourage you to take a look.  You can visit the website by clicking here.  You can find Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech, a Hubert Humphrey speech from 1948… I could go and on.  There’s some real history here!

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Nathan Hyde

I’m a Christ follower in Ocean Pines, Maryland. After God, my wife, and daughter, my favorite things are my students, Mexican food, reading, and Orioles baseball.

2 responses to “Great Speeches”

  1. Dylan

    One of my favorite speeches of all-time is on this site. It’s as interesting for the context as it is the content. The night MLK, JR. was killed, Robert Kennedy was aboard a train on the presidential campaign trail. He had a scheduled stop in Indianapolis, Indiana that evening, and stepped off the train to face an energetic and optimistic crowd. He somberly requests that they lower their signs, then shares the horrible news of King’s assassination. You can hear the crowd gasp. Next comes one of the most amazing speeches of love and unity to ever come from a politician’s heart. It is interesting to listen to King’s “Mountaintop” speech and then Kennedy’s, as the latter followed King by only one night. Sadly, Kennedy himself was killed two months later. A quote from the poem he recites in this speech is chiseled into the wall surrounding his tomb at Arlington National Cemetery, where he rests not far from his brother.

  2. Nathan Hyde

    Wow, that’s quite a story! Thanks for sharing it.

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