20 Speeches From History That Changed The World

In June 1940, British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his “Never Surrender” speech to the House of Commons after the evacuation of Allied forces from France in the Battle of Dunkirk. He committed Britain to fight “on the seas and oceans… in the air… on the beaches,” and closed with “we shall never surrender.” Parliament was not broadcast then. The British public heard Churchill’s words for the first time when a BBC newsreader read an extract of the speech that evening.

Abraham Lincoln delivered remarks at the dedication of a new soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, four months after the battle there. His two-minute address followed a two-hour keynote address by another speaker, Edward Everett. He linked the Civil War to the Declaration of Independence and called for “a new birth of freedom” and a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

“Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy,” U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt began his address to Congress on the day following the attack on Pearl Harbor, quoting a line that he’d added to his speech manuscript (“world history” became “infamy”). Some 81 million people listened to the six-minute speech on their radios. An hour later, Congress declared war on Japan.

The voice of Japanese Emperor Hirohito had not been heard on public broadcast until August 15, 1945, at midday. On that date, following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan, a recording was distributed stating that Japan would accept the Allied terms for surrender. The recording contained words of Hirohito, in an archaic form of Japanese court language that many did not understand, advising the citizens to “endure the unendurable,” and avoiding the word surrender. Japanese military officers had attempted to stop the broadcast the previous evening.

In Bombay, on August 8, 1942, Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the Indian independence movement, called upon other Congress leaders to Quit India. The British were using India’s resources to fight the Second World War, without India’s consent. “Do or Die,” he said. “We shall either free India or die in the attempt.” He asked Indians to participate in non-violent resistance, not an armed rebellion. The British arrested Gandhi and all other Congress leaders in the early hours of August 9. This led to protests across India.

In 1521, a German monk named Martin Luther stood before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at an imperial assembly in Worms, Germany, on trial for his writings attacking the authority of the pope. When asked to take back what he had written, Luther said he could not, unless he was shown his error by scripture or reason, saying his conscience was bound to the word of God. The emperor declared Luther an outlaw, but German princes offered him shelter, and the Western Church split into two forever. Luther’s famous line, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” is only found in pamphlets printed after the fact.

The Virginia lawyer Patrick Henry, known as a political orator, stood before delegates considering whether to reconcile with Britain during a convention in Richmond on March 23, 1775. He argued that peaceful petitioning was exhausted. He ended with his most famous words, “Give me liberty, or give me death.” The convention voted to arm and organize a militia. This happened three weeks before the fighting at Lexington and Concord. No one recorded Henry’s words that day. A biographer put them together several decades later from attendees’ memories, including Thomas Jefferson’s.

On August 9, 1588, Queen Elizabeth I went out to Tilbury Fort in England to address land forces that were being mobilized to protect London. Her navy had already inflicted damage on the ships of the Spanish Armada in the ocean far offshore. She said she had “the heart and stomach of a king.” The quotation is found in a letter written decades later by royal chaplain Leonel Sharp, not a transcript made during the event itself. And she was speaking to men who were on land, guarding the shores of the British Isles, not sailors.

In 1783, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army, was confronted by officers in Newburgh, New York, who were angry over years of unpaid wages and were threatening to ignore Congress entirely. Washington gave a speech in which he urged them to exercise restraint, and then put on his glasses, saying, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” The small act defused the situation, and the officers relented.

In June of 1940, one day after Marshal Philippe Pétain announced that France was going to sue for peace with Germany, Charles de Gaulle, a brigadier general in exile, made a speech from a BBC studio in London. He said France had lost only a battle, not the war, and that the French Empire still existed and still had the support of Britain. He urged all French soldiers and officers to join him. Almost nobody in France heard him. The speech did not become famous until it was repeated many times, via newspapers and clandestine publications.

Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary exiled by Tsarist Russia, was delivered back to the motherland on a sealed train in 1917 and made his way to Finland Station in Petrograd. Stepping out of the train, he mounted an armored car to address the crowd of workers and soldiers waiting for him. He lambasted the provisional government and World War I, and called on workers to take control by overthrowing the government with a socialist revolution. At another meeting the next day, Lenin put his plan down on paper. His document said “All Power to the Soviets” and laid out the path that would see the Bolsheviks come to power later that October.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson went before Congress, asking for a declaration of war on Germany. This came in the wake of Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the interception of a telegram from the German government inviting Mexico to join the war effort against the United States. He said, “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Four days later, Congress approved the resolution, shattering decades of hesitation by the United States to get involved in European wars.

President Franklin Roosevelt took the oath of office outside the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 1933. One in four Americans was unemployed, and the banks had failed. He told the crowd and the millions listening on their radios, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” And then, he asked for broad powers to deal with the crisis. By the end of the week, his administration was implementing the first New Deal programs.

Emmeline Pankhurst, whose organization fought for the British vote through militancy, was in Hartford, Connecticut, on November 13, 1913, talking about why women had been smashing windows and burning down buildings, even though she herself had been jailed and force-fed many times in Britain. She said, “I am here as a soldier who has temporarily left the battlefield … freedom or death.”

Sojourner Truth, a former slave whose mother tongue was Dutch, silenced preachers at an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, by pointing out that decades of physical labor and the loss of children to bondage had endowed her with neither feminine frailty nor female imbecility. A reporter wrote down what she told them that week. He did not record her in dialect, nor did he include her famous refrain: “Ain’t I a Woman?”

Frederick Douglass, a former slave who had become an abolitionist writer, spoke before 600 listeners in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852. He timed it deliberately for a day after the 4th of July, rather than on the holiday itself. Douglass lauded the founders’ love of liberty, but then asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” He demanded that they consider what the holiday signified to the three million black people still enslaved. He published his speech right away, helping to stir up antislavery sentiment in the years leading up to the Civil War.

A crowd gathered in the capital of France on July 26, 1794, to hear the leader of the Committee of Public Safety, Maximilien Robespierre, speak to the National Convention. He said there was a conspiracy in their midst, but wouldn’t say who the conspirators were. Every man in the assembly therefore feared that the conspiracy was aimed at him. They hooted at him and had him thrown into jail the next day. Two days after the speech, he was executed by the guillotine. This was the end of the Reign of Terror, which he had helped direct.

On November 8, 63 BC, the Roman consul Cicero took to the floor of the Senate to denounce a fellow senator, Lucius Sergius Catiline, for allegedly plotting to murder Rome’s magistrates and seize control of the republic. “How long, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” Cicero began. He then laid out the secret meetings held by the conspirators in detail. The very night of the speech, Catiline left Rome and traveled north to join his rebel forces. He was killed in battle the next year. Cicero would edit and publish the oration himself, three years later.

In 1095, Pope Urban II, head of the Catholic Church, answered a request for help from the Byzantine emperor against his Turkish adversaries who threatened Jerusalem. Speaking to nobles and knights assembled at the end of a church council at Clermont, France, Urban called on the belligerent rulers of Europe to cease fighting one another and to turn their swords to the east, promising forgiveness for all sins committed in the process. The assemblage responded with Deus vult, or “God wills it.” There is no transcript of what happened at Clermont. What we have instead are various chronicles by authors who recorded the incident years after the fact. The Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, and Urban died before the news reached Rome.

Pericles was an Athenian general and statesman who was selected to give the public funeral oration for soldiers who had fallen early in the course of the Athenian-Spartan War, during the winter of 431 BCE. But instead of simply praising their valor on the battlefield, he insisted that what made them worthy of death was Athenian democracy, the equal rights before the law, and the freedom to participate fully in public life. All we have of Pericles’s speech is the version preserved by the Greek historian Thucydides, who recreated the speech in his own literary style, not as a verbatim record.

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