LibGuides: Getting Started with Primary Sources: Speeches

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On this tab you'll find links to key speeches on civil rights, women's suffrage, and politics. For more speeches and topics, try browsing the titles below.

Chambers Classic Speeches
Brings together a diverse selection of eloquent, powerful, witty and passionate speeches, given by politicians, monarchs, rebels and intellectuals from around the world.
Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Including a never-before published speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., this is the first compilation of its kind, bringing together the most influential and important voices from two hundred years of America's struggle for civil rights, including essential speeches from leaders, both famous and obscure.
Milestone Documents in African American History
This title covers iconic primary documents from the 1600s to the present. Each entry offers the full text of the document as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. Among the sources included are important legislative documents such as the Reconstruction era amendments; critical Supreme Court decisions; and iconic speeches and writings by leaders such as Sojourner Truth, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.
Milestone Documents of American Leaders
Here, the lives of notable Americans are illuminated through an in-depth study of primary source texts they produced during their lifetimes. From presidents, jurists, and legislators to influential private citizens both past and present, American Leaders features important full-text sources written by the people who shaped the nation-and crucial scholarly analysis to help the documents come alive.

Women's Rights

Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Address at Seneca Falls, July 19, 1848
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
I should feel exceedingly diffident to appear before you at this time, having never before spoken in public, were I not nerved by a sense of right and duty, did I not feel the time had fully come for the question of woman’s wrongs to be laid before the public, did I not believe that woman herself must do this work; for woman alone can understand the height, the depth, the length, and the breadth of her own degradation.
Sojourner Truth: Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 1851
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out o’ kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North all a-talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.
Susan B. Anthony: Suffrage and the Working Woman, July 1871
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
I come to night . . . as a representative of the working women. I lay down my doctrine that the first step for the alleviation of their oppression is to secure to them pecuniary independence.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: Man Cannot Speak for Her, January 18, 1892
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul; our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment—our republican idea, individual citizenship.
Betty Friedan: The Real Sexual Revolution, 1969
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Women, even though they’re almost too visible as sex objects in this country, are invisible people. As the Negro was the invisible man, so women are the invisible people in America today.

Miscellaneous

‘Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,’ Jesus of Nazareth, c.30AD
From Chambers Classic Speeches
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
‘History is the judge - its executioner, the proletarian’ Karl Marx, 1856
From Chambers Classic Speeches
The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents - small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface, they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.
‘A system of government of men, not of angels’ Dick Gephardt (on Bill Clinton), 1998
From Chambers Classic Speeches
Mr Speaker and members of the House: I stood on this floor yesterday and implored all of us to say that the politics of slash-and-burn must end. I implored all of you that we must turn away from the politics of personal destruction and return to the politics of values.

Civil Rights

Frederick Douglass: What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, July 5, 1852
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable—and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight.
W. E. B. Du Bois: A Negro Nation Within a Nation, June 26, 1934 (1868–1963)
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
No more critical situation ever faced the Negroes of America than that of today—not in 1830, nor in 1861, nor in 1867. More than ever the appeal of the Negro for elementary justice falls on deaf ears.
Thurgood Marshall: Dismantling Segregation: Brown v. Board of Education, December 8, 1953
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
It follows that with education, this Court has made segregation and inequality equivalent concepts. They have equal rating, equal footing, and if segregation thus necessarily imports inequality, it makes no great difference whether we say that the Negro is wronged because he is segregated, or that he is wronged because he received unequal treatment.
Martin Luther King Jr: Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 5, 1955
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
My friends, we are certainly very happy to see each of you out this evening. We are here this evening for serious business. [Audience: Yes] We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens [That’s right] and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. [Yeah, That’s right]
Martin Luther King Jr: I Have a Dream, August 28, 1963
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. [Applause]
Martin Luther King Jr: I’ve Been to the Mountaintop, April 3, 1968
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

Political Speeches

Abraham Lincoln: A House Divided, June 16, 1858
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Convention.
We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.
Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.
In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Abraham Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863
From The Great American History Fact-Finder
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.
John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what your country can do for you," 1961
From Chambers Classic Speeches
Vice President Johnson, Mr Speaker, Mr Chief Justice, President Eisenhower, Vice-President Nixon, President Truman, reverend clergy, fellow citizens: we observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change.
John F. Kennedy, "We choose to go to the Moon," 1962
From Chambers Classic Speeches
We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
"The military-industrial complex" Dwight Eisenhower, 1961
From Chambers Classic Speeches
My fellow Americans: three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the presidency is vested in my successor.
John F. Kennedy: Civil Rights Message, June 11, 1963
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
Good evening, my fellow citizens:

This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro.
‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ 26 June 1963, West Berlin, West Germany
From Chambers Classic Speeches
I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished Mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin.
Robert F. Kennedy: On Martin Luther King’s Death, April 4, 1968
From Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
Ronald Reagan: ‘Tear down this wall!’ 1987
From Chambers Classic Speeches
Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen: 24 years ago, President John F Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I myself make my second visit to your city.