Lesson 17

Talk

Part One

Watch the video and do the exercises

Part Two

Great Speakers

Winston Churchill

When Paris fell to the Nazis on June 14, 1940, Britain began to ready itself for the brunt of the Axis powers on the Western front. Winston Churchill, who had taken over as prime minister just a month before, delivered his famous "Our Finest Hour" to a country bracing itself for full-scale attack. In 1953, Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in part for his speeches, which he wrote himself.

John F. Kennedy

Few speeches are as often quoted as John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, which he spent months writing. Kennedy's ability to speak as if he was having an authentic conversation with an audience, as opposed to lecturing to them, is one quality that made him such a great communicator.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The strong musicality of Martin Luther King Jr.'s rhetoric is perhaps just as famous as the words “not be judged on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." King drew inspiration from Shakespeare, the bible and others to write his "I Have a Dream" speech, one of the most famous of all time.

Part Three

Some Great Speeches

Socrates 4th Centruy BC

Accused of "corrupting youth" Socrates was given the choice to apologize or stand trial. He stood trial. His speech was a classic. He lost and got executed.

Best Line: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."

Ronald Regan Berlin 1987

Not a famous speaker but when he issued his famous challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union at the Berlin Wall, the speech earned mixed reviews. Even members of the President's own team were lukewarm on it. But in 1989, the Berlin Wall was demolished, and today the address is remembered, in the words of the German newspaper Bild, as a speech that "changed the world."

Best Line: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg 1863

At the site of one of the Civil War's crucial battles, Lincoln delivered speech that was as short— just about three minutes and 265 words long —as it was memorable. As he helped dedicate a cemetery to Gettysburg's fallen soldiers, he issued a stirring plea for the country to pay them tribute by honoring principles — liberty, equality — worth dying for.

Best Line: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."