If you click here you can check out “The Top 100 Speeches” at the American Rhetoric website.

Better yet, you can click on any/all of the 100 speeches and read the text.

And even better yet, you can click on any/all of them and download a pdf for your own personal media library.

Here are the “Top 10”:

1, Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have A Dream”
2. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Inaugural Address
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address
4. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
5. Barbara Charline Jordan, 1976 DNC Keynote Address
6. Richard Milhous Nixon, “Checkers”
7. Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet”
8. Ronald Wilson Reagan, Shuttle ”Challenger” Disaster Address
9. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Houston Ministerial Association Speech
10. Lyndon Baines Johnson, “We Shall Overcome”

I haven’t as yet checked out all of them but already know that most of these ten and the other 90 can also be seen on film. Thank you Google!

While on the subject of great speeches, I also high recommend William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, Updated and Expanded Edition. Amazon now sells a hardbound edition for only $29.70, a 34% discount. For anyone who has a keen interest in great speeches, this would be an outstanding holiday gift. Just a thought….