Time magazine has a feature on its Web site of “Best and Worst Lists.” These categories range from “Best TV Shows” to “Worst Cars” to “Top 10” lists. One that caught my eye recently was a “Top 10” list comprised of the “Top 10 Greatest Speeches.”
It starts out with Socrates’ speech “Apology” from the 4th Century B.C. (did I mention this Top 10 was “of all time”?) and goes up to Ronald Regan. Ronald, really? “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” is a memorable line, but really, one of the greatest? Maybe this list should have been titled “Top 10 Memorable Speeches” instead. Time even states that at the moment Regan gave that speech it earned mixed reviews. Even his own staff was “lukewarm on it.” But then, two years later in 1989, the Berlin Wall was demolished, so I guess that boosted the speech’s cred.
I was surprised to see President Lyndon B. Johnson’s name on the list. I didn’t think he was a well-regarded president, but I must admit that I’m no history buff. Maybe it’s just the people around me in the Midwest that don’t like him? Anyway, his 1965 speech in Selma, Alabama “We Shall Overcome” made the list because Johnson helped the Voting Rights Act bill get passed. President Johnson addressed Congress and called upon the members to vote for the bill that would enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments, which would eliminate strategies that prevented blacks and other minorities from voting. I would say that’s a memorable speech, maybe even a catalyst of change-type of speech. Maybe that’s what the list should be called: “Top 10 Catalyst of Change Speeches.”
After all, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech made the list. Can you believe King, Jr. was only 34 when he delivered that speech? That’s pretty impressive – I thought he was older when he delivered that speech. The year after the speech, 1964, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was assassinated four years later. King was a Baptist minister who fought for civil rights from a young age. He led the Montgomery Bus Boycott and of course, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where he delivered the now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s amazing to me that he did all this with nonviolence in a time when black people were getting brutally beaten and fined and sent to jail for doing things that should have been their right all along.
John F. Kennedy also made the list, with his famous inaugural speech that included the line “My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
The other speeches that rounded out the Top 10 were by Winston Churchill, Susan B. Anthony, Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass and Patrick Henry. What does this list tell us?
I think it tells us how powerful our words are. No matter if we’re talking to friends and family or addressing a whole nation, we need to choose our words carefully. Especially in this day and age, when everything is recorded – our words are practically set in stone.
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