A Composite Speech

With this piece I have Borrowed from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – From Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream Speech – Shakespeare’s St Crispen’s Day speech and To Be Or Not to Be together with parts of Winston Churchill’s Wartime speeches.

A composite speech that includes parts of all of my most favourite speeches.

-------------------------------------------------

This sweltering summer of legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges or die in the attempt.

To Die to sleep, no more, and by a sleep to say we end the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to but in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil. And so it is that conscience does make cowards of us all and enterprises of great pitch and moment are sicklied over with the pale cast of thought but to sleep is no more than a chance to dream.

Ay there’s the rub, for I have a dream that one day even such a place as England, like a desert state, sweltering in the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressors wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay or the insolence of office. When it was our fathers who brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

This nation will have, under God, a new birth of freedom. And if it is to be a great nation then let freedom ring. Let freedom ring from the snow-capped mountains. Let freedom ring from the valleys. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill and from every mountainside, let freedom ring. Let freedom ring from the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

And Crispin Crispian shall never go by from this day to the ending of the world but that we in it shall be remembered. Therefore let us brace ourselves to our duties and forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline because we too hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour!”

Because, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender! Because, in the field of human conflict never was so much owed by so many to so few and gentlemen in England, now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here and hold their man-hoods cheap whilst any speak that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day to preserve the ideal that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth and with this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood as we sing “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last!”

End