Tag: Speech

Great Speeches: Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator [Video]

From the 1940 Charlie Chaplin movie, The Great Dictator

Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

Full text of the speech here

Great speeches: Patrick Henry, Give me liberty or give me death [Video]

Patrick Henry was a leading advocate of the American Revolution. After over a decade of struggle with the economic and political policies of the British under King George III, many citizens in the American colonies felt the need to resist British encroachment on their civil rights. In March of 1775 the Second Virginia Convention met at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. There 120 delegates, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, met to debate the issue of organizing a militia to resist Great Britain’s oppressive rule. On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered a speech which supported military action against the British. This stirring speech swayed the vote and was most likely the deciding factor in committing Virginia troops to fight the British. Less than a month after Henry’s speech, on April 19, 1775, the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place marking the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

The Art of Public Speaking [Article]

Maria Popova shares this quote from “How to use the power of the printed word” stuck a chord, while providing tips on how to overcome stage fright in the course of public speaking:

The more you sweat in advance, the less you’ll have to sweat once you appear on stage. Research your topic thoroughly. Check the library for facts, quotes, books, and timely magazine and newspaper articles on your subject. Get in touch with experts. Write to them, make phone calls, get interviews to help round out your material.

Albert Einstien on Personal Liberty [Video]

Albert Einstein became a refugee from his native Germany after the Nazi’s rose to power. Listen to this rare recording of him speaking on individual liberty – a pertinent topic of our times.

We are concerned not merely with the technical problem of securing and maintaining peace, but also with the important task of education and enlightenment. Without such reason there would have been no Shakespeare, no Goethe, no Newton, no Pasteur”

Doing a job [article]

Admiral Hyman Rickover, retired, of the US Navy, had this to say to the graduating class of the Columbia University School of Engineering on Nov 5, 1981. In Doing a Job, he points out that “There is concern today over the apparent decline in U.S. productivity. In searching for its causes we should not overlook the impact of the many professional administrators who run large corporations. Though trained in management at our leading universities, they are often unskilled in the technical aspects of the company. As a result they manage largely in the terms they learned at school. Technical, operational, and production issues are quickly reduced to issues of numbers and dollars, upon which these administrators apply their management techniques. Although in this way they may achieve financial benefits, an overemphasis on short-term profits often ignores broader issues such as efficient production or planning for the future. How can they act otherwise, when they have knowledge only of management theories learned in school?.