Recently in Speeches Category

Eleanor Roosevelt's Human Rights Speech

delivered 28 September 1948, Paris, France

I have come this evening to talk with you on one of the greatest issues of our time -- that is the preservation of human freedom. I have chosen to discuss it here in France, at the Sorbonne, because here in this soil the roots of human freedom have long ago struck deep and here they have been richly nourished. It was here the Declaration of the Rights of Man was proclaimed, and the great slogans of the French Revolution -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- fired the imagination of men.

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

July 4, 1776  (audio mp3 reading by John F. Kennedy)

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

"I Have a Dream" by Martin Luther King, Jr.

In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which organized civil rights activities throughout the United States. In August 1963, he led the great march on Washington, where he delivered this memorable speech in front of 250,000 people gathered by the Lincoln Memorial and millions more who watched on television.