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World's Great Speeches by Lewis Copeland
Nearly 300 speeches from nearly every historical Socrates, Julius Caesar, St. Francis, Martin Luther, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Fulton J. Sheen, Barbara Jordan, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan, Nelson Mandela, Earl of Spencer, and many others offer provocative themes, historic parallels, and memorable quotations.
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First published January 1, 1942
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 7, 2023
Not all speeches were note worthy in my opinion, but the ones I chose to read in full were extraordinary and made me smile. In times such as the ones we live in now where people just seem to be alot colder and distant, and indifferent; I thought about society during the times when some of these words were spoken for the first time and I felt humbled and hopeful to know that in the middle of darkness and chaos there were people who still found the words to inspire and connect with others and bring the best of humanity out into the forefront. I haven't heard a good speech in a long while now but until I do I'll reread some best ones I found within these pages.
November 11, 2021
I read this book 20 years ago and was really hoping there would be a new edition out by now. A plethora of historically important speeches on a wide range of topics, and I would like to see what from our own era gets included in such a compendium.
September 29, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #World History and Civilizations #Primary Sources & Classic Text Anthologies
There is something magnetic about a great speech. It is one of the few art forms that exists at the crossroads of intellect and performance, conviction and improvisation. The World’s Great Speeches, edited by Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, and Stephen J. McKenna, captures this magic and distills it into a single, massive volume. It’s not merely an anthology; it’s a living archive of voices that once shook rooms, swayed nations, or whispered truths into the world’s ear.
Reading it feels less like flipping through a book and more like entering a hall filled with echoes, where the ghosts of Cicero and Lincoln, Gandhi and Churchill, Elizabeth I and Sojourner Truth still hold court. This book is, at its heart, a testament to the enduring power of spoken words to shape history, ignite movements, and articulate the deepest aspirations and fears of humankind.
The editors have not organized the book as a dry chronological march through history, nor as a predictable canon of “Western” speeches. Instead, they’ve built it as an expansive panorama of rhetorical brilliance across time, geography, and purpose. There are political speeches and sermons, trial defenses and revolutionary manifestos, invocations and farewells, moments of triumph and of despair.
By including not only the expected names but also figures whose speeches have been eclipsed by time, the editors remind readers that history is full of voices, not just victors. One can move from Pericles’ funeral oration to Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant feminism, from the spiritual cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. to the clinical precision of Robert Kennedy’s appeals, and feel the shifting temperature of centuries, societies, and struggles. This sheer variety is one of the book’s great strengths. It is not a museum of rhetoric but a bazaar of voices.
What makes the anthology compelling is not only its scope but the editorial intelligence behind it. Copeland, Lamm, and McKenna understand that a speech is not simply a text; it is a performance tied to a moment, a crisis, a crowd, an occasion. They provide enough context for each selection to help readers imagine the setting and stakes—the packed courtroom where Clarence Darrow defended evolution, the rain-swept field where Chief Joseph surrendered, the Assembly Hall where Nehru spoke of India’s tryst with destiny. These brief introductions don’t drown the speeches in academic commentary; they frame them just enough to make their power intelligible without blunting their edge. Readers can feel the urgency in Lincoln’s voice at Gettysburg, or the tremor in Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” without needing a full historical essay. This balance between context and text is what makes the collection so readable.
There is also a deliberate effort to broaden the canon beyond the expected. Many anthologies of “great speeches” lean heavily toward Anglophone, male, and political addresses. Here, while there is still a tilt toward Western history—inevitable, given the record of preserved speeches—the editors make space for non-Western voices and for speeches that arise from religious, cultural, and social movements rather than statecraft alone.
The inclusion of leaders like Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, and Ho Chi Minh, or of speeches tied to abolition, suffrage, and civil rights, signals that the editors understand greatness not as mere eloquence but as moral and historical resonance. This democratizing impulse gives the book a layered richness. It’s not only a record of those in power but also of those who spoke against it.
Reading the speeches consecutively, one starts to see patterns emerge, not unlike the patterns of world history in von Sivers’s book. There is the perennial use of storytelling to legitimize authority, the invocation of shared values to mobilize action, the appeal to justice as a universal touchstone. There is also the evolution of rhetorical style itself.
Ancient oratory tends toward the formal and ceremonial, crafted for memory and oral transmission. Modern speeches often embrace brevity, emotional directness, and soundbite-ready phrasing. Moving from Cicero to Churchill to Obama is like tracing the history of language as much as the history of politics. Yet despite differences of era and culture, the basic functions of speech—persuading, inspiring, warning, consoling—remain remarkably constant. In this sense, the book operates as both a historical resource and a kind of manual for the art of public speaking.
Another striking dimension is how these speeches, taken together, sketch a kind of unofficial history of human ideals. They chronicle our recurring struggles with war and peace, freedom and tyranny, justice and inequality. They also show how the same ideals can be invoked for opposite ends. A rousing call to arms may sound similar whether it is defending democracy or launching conquest. This moral ambivalence is part of what makes the collection so thought-provoking.
It forces readers to consider not only the beauty of rhetoric but also its power to deceive, to inflame, to justify oppression as easily as it can champion liberty. Copeland and his co-editors do not editorialize this point, but the juxtaposition of speeches makes it impossible to ignore. In an age of information overload and viral soundbites, this is a sobering reminder.
Compared to more recent anthologies—say, The Penguin Book of Great Speeches or William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears—this volume feels both more expansive and more old-school in its approach. It has the heft and seriousness of a mid-20th-century project, a belief in the canon as something to be curated for posterity. Later collections tend to favour shorter excerpts and more contemporary material. Copeland, Lamm, and McKenna aim for comprehensiveness and depth, including full speeches wherever possible and reaching far back into history. This makes the book particularly valuable for readers and students who want to study not only the words but also the structure and rhythm of classic oratory. The editors are not trying to create a coffee-table book of quotable lines but a working anthology for serious engagement.
The book also has a curious way of collapsing time. Reading Queen Elizabeth I’s address to the troops at Tilbury alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech or Malala Yousafzai’s UN address, one senses the continuity of human confrontation with crisis. The technology changes—horses and longbows give way to aircraft carriers and the internet—but the moment of facing a crowd and trying to summon courage, unity, or action is timeless. This continuity is strangely comforting. It reminds readers that while our circumstances may be unprecedented, the act of rising to speak truth or hope into the air is as old as civilization itself.
For teachers, The World’s Great Speeches is a goldmine. It can anchor courses in rhetoric, history, political science, or leadership. Students can analyze speeches not only for content but also for technique—how metaphors are used, how arguments are structured, how cadence and repetition build momentum. They can also debate the ethics of rhetoric: when does persuasion cross into manipulation? When is passion a virtue, and when is it a danger? Because the speeches are presented in full, students can see how great orators built their cases over time rather than relying on a few quotable lines. This depth encourages critical thinking rather than mere hero-worship.
Yet the book is not only for classrooms. It rewards solitary reading, too. One can dip into it at random, letting history surprise you. Perhaps you open to Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty” or to Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” or to Sojourner Truth’s radical reframing of womanhood. Each speech is a window into a particular moment when someone, somewhere, stood up and tried to shape the world with nothing but their voice. This randomness is part of the pleasure. The book invites not only study but serendipity.
It also raises an implicit question about the future of great speeches. In an age of Twitter threads, TikTok clips, and algorithmic attention spans, can a 30-minute address still hold an audience, let alone change a nation? Will the next generation’s “great speeches” be memes, videos, or collective movements rather than single, authoritative voices? Reading Copeland’s anthology in 2025, one senses both nostalgia and urgency. Nostalgia for an era when rhetoric was a public art, honed over time, capable of moving masses without the amplification of digital platforms. Urgency because the need for eloquent, ethical, courageous speech has not diminished. If anything, it has grown. The format may change, but the human hunger for words that matter endures.
The editors seem aware of this tension. By gathering speeches from different eras, they show that even in times of upheaval—printing press, telegraph, radio, television—the spoken word has adapted rather than disappeared. Perhaps our era of livestreams and viral clips is another chapter in this long story. If so, anthologies like this will be invaluable as archives of what came before, teaching us not only what was said but how it was said, and why it resonated.
Ultimately, The World’s Great Speeches is a book about power—not the power of armies or money but the power of ideas when they are voiced at the right time, in the right way. It is a reminder that history is not only made by actions but also by words that galvanize those actions. For readers, it offers not just a lesson in history but an apprenticeship in courage, vision, and communication. To read it is to sit at the feet of some of humanity’s most compelling speakers, to listen to them wrestle with freedom, justice, war, peace, faith, and doubt, and to realize that the conversation they began is still unfinished. In that sense, the book is less a monument than a summons—a call to speak, to listen, and to remember that language can still shape the world.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
There is something magnetic about a great speech. It is one of the few art forms that exists at the crossroads of intellect and performance, conviction and improvisation. The World’s Great Speeches, edited by Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, and Stephen J. McKenna, captures this magic and distills it into a single, massive volume. It’s not merely an anthology; it’s a living archive of voices that once shook rooms, swayed nations, or whispered truths into the world’s ear.
Reading it feels less like flipping through a book and more like entering a hall filled with echoes, where the ghosts of Cicero and Lincoln, Gandhi and Churchill, Elizabeth I and Sojourner Truth still hold court. This book is, at its heart, a testament to the enduring power of spoken words to shape history, ignite movements, and articulate the deepest aspirations and fears of humankind.
The editors have not organized the book as a dry chronological march through history, nor as a predictable canon of “Western” speeches. Instead, they’ve built it as an expansive panorama of rhetorical brilliance across time, geography, and purpose. There are political speeches and sermons, trial defenses and revolutionary manifestos, invocations and farewells, moments of triumph and of despair.
By including not only the expected names but also figures whose speeches have been eclipsed by time, the editors remind readers that history is full of voices, not just victors. One can move from Pericles’ funeral oration to Emmeline Pankhurst’s militant feminism, from the spiritual cadences of Martin Luther King Jr. to the clinical precision of Robert Kennedy’s appeals, and feel the shifting temperature of centuries, societies, and struggles. This sheer variety is one of the book’s great strengths. It is not a museum of rhetoric but a bazaar of voices.
What makes the anthology compelling is not only its scope but the editorial intelligence behind it. Copeland, Lamm, and McKenna understand that a speech is not simply a text; it is a performance tied to a moment, a crisis, a crowd, an occasion. They provide enough context for each selection to help readers imagine the setting and stakes—the packed courtroom where Clarence Darrow defended evolution, the rain-swept field where Chief Joseph surrendered, the Assembly Hall where Nehru spoke of India’s tryst with destiny. These brief introductions don’t drown the speeches in academic commentary; they frame them just enough to make their power intelligible without blunting their edge. Readers can feel the urgency in Lincoln’s voice at Gettysburg, or the tremor in Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” without needing a full historical essay. This balance between context and text is what makes the collection so readable.
There is also a deliberate effort to broaden the canon beyond the expected. Many anthologies of “great speeches” lean heavily toward Anglophone, male, and political addresses. Here, while there is still a tilt toward Western history—inevitable, given the record of preserved speeches—the editors make space for non-Western voices and for speeches that arise from religious, cultural, and social movements rather than statecraft alone.
The inclusion of leaders like Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen, and Ho Chi Minh, or of speeches tied to abolition, suffrage, and civil rights, signals that the editors understand greatness not as mere eloquence but as moral and historical resonance. This democratizing impulse gives the book a layered richness. It’s not only a record of those in power but also of those who spoke against it.
Reading the speeches consecutively, one starts to see patterns emerge, not unlike the patterns of world history in von Sivers’s book. There is the perennial use of storytelling to legitimize authority, the invocation of shared values to mobilize action, the appeal to justice as a universal touchstone. There is also the evolution of rhetorical style itself.
Ancient oratory tends toward the formal and ceremonial, crafted for memory and oral transmission. Modern speeches often embrace brevity, emotional directness, and soundbite-ready phrasing. Moving from Cicero to Churchill to Obama is like tracing the history of language as much as the history of politics. Yet despite differences of era and culture, the basic functions of speech—persuading, inspiring, warning, consoling—remain remarkably constant. In this sense, the book operates as both a historical resource and a kind of manual for the art of public speaking.
Another striking dimension is how these speeches, taken together, sketch a kind of unofficial history of human ideals. They chronicle our recurring struggles with war and peace, freedom and tyranny, justice and inequality. They also show how the same ideals can be invoked for opposite ends. A rousing call to arms may sound similar whether it is defending democracy or launching conquest. This moral ambivalence is part of what makes the collection so thought-provoking.
It forces readers to consider not only the beauty of rhetoric but also its power to deceive, to inflame, to justify oppression as easily as it can champion liberty. Copeland and his co-editors do not editorialize this point, but the juxtaposition of speeches makes it impossible to ignore. In an age of information overload and viral soundbites, this is a sobering reminder.
Compared to more recent anthologies—say, The Penguin Book of Great Speeches or William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears—this volume feels both more expansive and more old-school in its approach. It has the heft and seriousness of a mid-20th-century project, a belief in the canon as something to be curated for posterity. Later collections tend to favour shorter excerpts and more contemporary material. Copeland, Lamm, and McKenna aim for comprehensiveness and depth, including full speeches wherever possible and reaching far back into history. This makes the book particularly valuable for readers and students who want to study not only the words but also the structure and rhythm of classic oratory. The editors are not trying to create a coffee-table book of quotable lines but a working anthology for serious engagement.
The book also has a curious way of collapsing time. Reading Queen Elizabeth I’s address to the troops at Tilbury alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech or Malala Yousafzai’s UN address, one senses the continuity of human confrontation with crisis. The technology changes—horses and longbows give way to aircraft carriers and the internet—but the moment of facing a crowd and trying to summon courage, unity, or action is timeless. This continuity is strangely comforting. It reminds readers that while our circumstances may be unprecedented, the act of rising to speak truth or hope into the air is as old as civilization itself.
For teachers, The World’s Great Speeches is a goldmine. It can anchor courses in rhetoric, history, political science, or leadership. Students can analyze speeches not only for content but also for technique—how metaphors are used, how arguments are structured, how cadence and repetition build momentum. They can also debate the ethics of rhetoric: when does persuasion cross into manipulation? When is passion a virtue, and when is it a danger? Because the speeches are presented in full, students can see how great orators built their cases over time rather than relying on a few quotable lines. This depth encourages critical thinking rather than mere hero-worship.
Yet the book is not only for classrooms. It rewards solitary reading, too. One can dip into it at random, letting history surprise you. Perhaps you open to Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty” or to Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” or to Sojourner Truth’s radical reframing of womanhood. Each speech is a window into a particular moment when someone, somewhere, stood up and tried to shape the world with nothing but their voice. This randomness is part of the pleasure. The book invites not only study but serendipity.
It also raises an implicit question about the future of great speeches. In an age of Twitter threads, TikTok clips, and algorithmic attention spans, can a 30-minute address still hold an audience, let alone change a nation? Will the next generation’s “great speeches” be memes, videos, or collective movements rather than single, authoritative voices? Reading Copeland’s anthology in 2025, one senses both nostalgia and urgency. Nostalgia for an era when rhetoric was a public art, honed over time, capable of moving masses without the amplification of digital platforms. Urgency because the need for eloquent, ethical, courageous speech has not diminished. If anything, it has grown. The format may change, but the human hunger for words that matter endures.
The editors seem aware of this tension. By gathering speeches from different eras, they show that even in times of upheaval—printing press, telegraph, radio, television—the spoken word has adapted rather than disappeared. Perhaps our era of livestreams and viral clips is another chapter in this long story. If so, anthologies like this will be invaluable as archives of what came before, teaching us not only what was said but how it was said, and why it resonated.
Ultimately, The World’s Great Speeches is a book about power—not the power of armies or money but the power of ideas when they are voiced at the right time, in the right way. It is a reminder that history is not only made by actions but also by words that galvanize those actions. For readers, it offers not just a lesson in history but an apprenticeship in courage, vision, and communication. To read it is to sit at the feet of some of humanity’s most compelling speakers, to listen to them wrestle with freedom, justice, war, peace, faith, and doubt, and to realize that the conversation they began is still unfinished. In that sense, the book is less a monument than a summons—a call to speak, to listen, and to remember that language can still shape the world.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
May 13, 2008
Okay so I haven't read all these speeches. But I remember doing a presentation of Red Jacket's speech and thinking that it was a very eloquent attack on whitey. Which I'm all for. Because Manifest Destiny was stupid, and white people needed to be told to stop it (even if they didn't listen). Also, I think I read a few other ones and thought they were interesting. I should probably (re-)read this if I actually want to review it.
January 23, 2023
Absolutely delighted to have come across this inspiring book. The speeches contain the pain, the excitement of the speakers on point which the readers can even feel while reading. I liked the speeches by Indian personalities especially, maybe it's because of my origin and roots.
April 10, 2022
Excellent for any teachers looking to assign short, excellent, speeches for students to recite.
February 24, 2023
A perspective from behind the curtain, although, speeches should not be read but heard.
July 3, 2008
Compilation of some of the greatest oratory gems from ancient Greece to WWII. It sucks that most of the speeches are from West Europe and United States. Not a lot from Eastern Europe...or the rest of the world for that matter. So it's not complete, but it definitely is entertaining to flip through. The words as they spoke them; it definitely has a weight to it.
September 2, 2009
I really liked this collection of Speeches and still do, but was disappointed to find recently that at least one was edited heavily. Whole paragraphs were taken out of the Eugene Debs speech from 1919. I am currently reading another book that contained the whole speech and they edited out some really good stuff. Now I wonder how much all the other speeches were edited.
May 11, 2011
Not the best collection I've ever read and also not verbatim, which is just a cop-out. I listened to Martin Luther King's speech and read along and there were differences. That was not professional; I could have done a better job.
Still, some broad stuff that I am glad to have read.
Still, some broad stuff that I am glad to have read.
June 9, 2014
I picked some 30 of 292 speeches.. brief but powerful...
From Patrick Henry's Give me freedom or Give me Death, To MLK's I have a dream, i really loved reading them all.
To revisit again and read others when I can again.. For now marking it read.
From Patrick Henry's Give me freedom or Give me Death, To MLK's I have a dream, i really loved reading them all.
To revisit again and read others when I can again.. For now marking it read.
June 2, 2012
Some great words by some great men, though they may not have known it at the time.
January 21, 2016
Σπουδαίο βιβλίο. Οποιος γνωρίζει Αγγλικά να το πάρει, είναι πραγματικά μια όαση στην πλημμύρα των βιβλίων
December 5, 2016
Over 95% of the 293 speeches were of interest.
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March 15, 2019815 C782w 1973
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews