Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History Read Online Free PDF

by Ben-Gay. I pick up Perelman’s big book now and then; lifting it gives me a lift, as I hope this volume will do for you. (It would have been lighter but for the stream of speeches brought in by my chief of research,Jeffrey McQuain, and my editorial aide, Ann Elise Rubin; thanks, too, to Jeanne Smith of the Library of Congress, and to Professor Janet Coryell for hard-to-find speeches by women, and to Gerald Howard and Emma Lewis from W. W. Norton, the intrepid publishers. We have just saved a page of acknowledgments.)
    You are now an abnormally sophisticated audience. You know the tricks of the speech trade, some of the devices of the phrasemaker and speechwriter, and you expect the speaker now to summarize—to tell ’em what he told ’em.
    Sorry; there’s a secret eleventh step: cross ’em up now and then. This is, after all, a speech meant to be read, not spoken; the metaphoric listener is really a reader who can skip back as no real listener easily can. You, dear speech reader, are lending not your ears but your eyes, which are much more perceptive and analytic organs. After receiving the moral directions summarized on the tablets he brought down from Mount Sinai, Moses spoke to the people of Israel—but nowhere is it written that he found a need to summarize the Ten Commandments.
    What every audience needs, however, is a sense of completion; what the speaker needs is a way out on a high note. That’s a necessary ingredient to shapeliness. That calls for a peroration.
    A peroration, my friends, is a devastating defense against the dread disease of dribbling-off. It should start with a quiet, declarative sentence; it should build in a series of semicolons; it should employ the puissance of parallelism; it should make the farthest rafter reverberate with the action and passion of our time, and—throwing aside all rules of short sentences or self-quotation—it should reach into the hearts and souls of a transfixed humankind to say, “This—this!—is the end of the best damned speech you’ve ever had the good fortune to experience.” (Sustained applause, punctuated by “Bravo!” “Let us march!” and “You tell ’em, Buster!”—followed by some smart-aleck pundit wrinkling his nose and wondering aloud, “But what did he really say?”)

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MEMORIALS AND PATRIOTIC SPEECHES

Pericles Extols the Glory That Is Greece at the Funeral of Its Fallen Sons
    “Those… have the greatest souls, who, most acutely sensible of the miseries of war and the sweets of peace, are not hence in the least deterred from facing danger.”
    Pericles was a cautious general, a stern imperialist, an ardent patron of the arts, and a radical politician. Although he was born an aristocrat around the turn of the fifth century B.C ., his “graces of persuasion,” in Cicero’s phrase, did much to curb the power of the aristocracy and extend democracy to the citizens of the city-state of Athens. For example, he pressed successfully for the payment of fees to jurors and, later, to public officials—which made it possible for a poor man to hold public office.
    Fewer than forty thousand males made up the polity of Athens, and all were members of the Assembly. It chose by lot the Council of Five Hundred, fifty from each tribe, to manage its affairs, and elected juries of a hundred to a thousand men to decide cases. This was before lawyers came on the scene; each man was his own pleader, and a citizen required a mastery of the art of oratory to gain or defeat justice. Pericles was reputed to be one of the most eloquent at these meetings of the democratic legislature, exceeded only by fourth-century Greek orator Demosthenes.
    “Reputed” is a necessary qualifier because we have no text of these Greek speeches. The reputation of Pericles rests on the writings of historian Thucydides, in his
History of the Peloponnesian War
. “With reference to the speeches in this history,” the chronicler wrote candidly, “…some I heard myself,