Movie Speech: City Slickers

A depressed Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) addresses his son’s primary school class in City Slickers (1991):

“Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly.

When you’re a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do.

Your twenties are a blur.

Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, ‘What happened to my twenties?’

Your forties, you grow a little pot belly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother.

Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You’ll call it a ‘procedure’, but it’s a surgery.

Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it anyway.

Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale, you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering ‘How come the kids don’t call?’

By your eighties, you’ve had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand but who you call mama.

Any questions?”

Speech: Gettysburg Address / Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

"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.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

Movie Speech: A Few Good Men

Jack Nicolson as Colonel Nathan R Jessup, A Few Good Men (1992).

Colonel Jessup, the Commanding Officer of Guatanamo Naval Base, is being cross examined during a court martial of two of his men in respect of the death of another Marine. During the trial it is an issue as to whether Colonel Jessup ordered a "Code Red", an unofficial act of punishment, in respect of the dead Marine who was seen by Jessup to be a troublemaker and screw up. Lieutenant Kaffee, defence counsel, exchanges with Jessup with raised voices and demands that Colonel Jessup reveal the truth.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye8kZQ61Oxg

Speech:Martin Luther King / I Have a Dream

This is a speech that never fails to give me goose bumps when I hear it, probably one of the greatest speeches ever made in history, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jnr "I Have a Dream" Speech. It is worth taking the time to read and, for those willing to spend a bit of additional time, to listen to it at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm I find that it works best to play the audio (instead of watching the video) and to read the text on that same page as the audio is playing.

In 1963 Native Americans were in a lousy position.Oppressed, discriminated against, segregated. Denied basic rights that we take for granted, I recall regularly seeing news broadcasts of police beating up men, women and children on peaceful marches. Black churches were bombed. In Mississippi black advocates for equality were murdered. Is it any wonder that there was a militant backlash advocating black violence, black power and revolution.