When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that shape the world – and why we need them

by Philip Collins

The currency of persuasion in a democracy, he argued, is not force or authority. It is speech. The moment that fiat is replaced by consent is the moment that oratory begins to count. Rhetoric and democracy are twinned; their histories run together.

The spectacle of a single person walking to a podium to persuade an audience remains now exactly as it was then. Very few disciplines survive twenty centuries. Nothing of the science of the period is of much more than curiosity value. The drama is still performed, but most of its stylistic conventions are anachronisms. Disciplines tend to date, positions are superseded, ideas fall into disuse, new frontiers are discovered. None of that is true of rhetoric. Reputations in the ancient republics were won and burnished by theatrical performance, and in politics today, they still are. Whether they know it or not, public speakers of all the succeeding ages owe a debt to Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric and Cicero’s De oratore.

Cicero gives us a portrait of the ideal orator. There was no separation, for him, between rhetoric and politics, so the orator needed to be steeped in political wisdom, to display a command of language and psychological insight into the audience, to be witty, shrewd and funny. In an age in which speeches were delivered by heart, the orator needed perfect recall. They also needed a resonant voice, although not all of them have had it. Demosthenes practised with pebbles in his mouth with the aim of improving his timbre. Abraham Lincoln was barely audible at Gettysburg, Winston Churchill sought medical help over his lisp, and John F. Kennedy’s voice was often said to be too reedy for his grand words. The central point of De oratore, what Cicero calls

Topic, should be engraved over the desk of every speechwriter: make sure you know your central point. This is advice that has worked for all speakers, in every nation and every time, and will always work. The central point of this book is that liberal democracies are the best imaginable places to live an...

Social class was no longer enough to support a political career, as every free male citizen enjoyed the right to speak in the assembly.

Ford, Carter, George H. W. Bush – were poor speakers while the charmers – Reagan, Clinton, Obama – talked themselves into second terms. No politician ever fares better with phrases ragged and unformed. Their words

purple prose does not sound black and white when it is spoken. When he was criticised by William Faulkner for his limited vocabulary, Ernest Hemingway gave a reply that was not intended as advice for speechwriters but works as such anyway: ‘Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words and those are the ones I use.’

Soon after the audience started to grow, the world started to shrink. Radio, television and the internet have vastly extended the reach of a political speech. Before mass media connected leaders to their public, rhetoric was an elite game.

Politics is the best idea about government that anybody ever had, or ever will have. Words need to inspire because disenchantment with politics fosters

The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but at the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.

The greatest speeches are essays in simple language, easily comprehensible to a democratic audience, but works of beauty and profundity all the same. As a collection, the finest public speeches tell the story of the unfolding of human accomplishment through politics. This book is not a story of human progress in the manner of the old Whig theory, in which history moves serenely from darkness towards the light. There

Good things are still being said. The question is whether we are still listening.

politics has become dry then it needs to be reinvigorated by the precious democratic gift represented by the principle of hope.

Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric still work; they will always work. Invention, he says, is the drafting of good arguments; disposition is the arrangement of those arguments for best effect; style is giving the argument shape in language; memory is recall in an age before autocue; pronunciation is delivery on the day. Cicero also identified three styles. The plain style should be used to teach, the ornate middle style to please, and the grand style to arouse the emotions. But De oratore was more than a book of instructions on how to talk. It was a book of statecraft as well: the subjects were for Cicero indivisible. If rhetoric and democracy were born together with Pericles, then rhetoric and statecraft were united by Cicero.

is an indispensable lesson for every speaker, at every level. It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you.

wise government is defined more by what it prevents than either what it does or what it permits.

It’s not; it’s a statement of an ideal, a foundation myth and a utopian aspiration. As he did in the Declaration of Independence, when he simply

asserted that all men were created equal and were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jefferson is setting a standard. America didn’t meet it then; no nation does now. But the claim that liberal democracy represents the terminus of political philosophy rests on the list of popular freedoms contained in this passage. The political battle to instantiate them in existing societies goes on but, philosophically, this is the last word.

Lincoln has moved from the past to the future, the direction of every good speech.

energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift. You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home. That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty. We can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today. In its way one of the most quietly moving passages Obama has ever uttered. This is not the most dramatic speech he ever gave, nor the one that most directly stirs the emotions. Obama’s speech about race in 2008 and his victory speech the same year in Grant Park may be greater. His decision to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ after the murder of the Reverend Pinckney in Charleston in 2015 is one of the most affecting moments of public speech there is. Obama often sounds like he is singing; on that ...

has to be better, more enchanted politics.

Voltaire said that heaven has given us two things – hope and sleep – to make up for the many miseries of life. We sleep more soundly in our beds if we know that our politics will keep us safe. Liberal democracies rely on fine articulations of the principle of hope, and

We need to take heed of John F. Kennedy’s warning that good government is done with the people rather than to the people. And we have Barack Obama’s reminder, from not so long ago, that when hope connects to power it is

The calls for unity made by Jefferson, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama are far more than political platitudes. They are the deepest wisdom of political thought.

These speeches communicate a spirit too. They are not dry political theories. They are words written to cajole, persuade and inspire, words that articulate the principle of hope which was described by Ernst Bloch in the book of that name as follows: ‘Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness.’ Populism, which trades on – relies upon – fear, is locked into nothingness. Camus’s brilliant observation bears repeating. The democrat is the one who knows he does not know everything. Only the populist utopian thinks he has all the answers. He promises an odyssey to utopia but he is going nowhere.

All countries are imagined and forged by words. The act of saying that someone is included is also the act of including them.

King was, rather flatly, imploring the congregation to ‘go back to Louisiana’, Jackson cried out ‘Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.’ King grabbed the podium and set his prepared text to his left. The act transformed him into a Baptist preacher. ‘Aw, shit’, said Walker. ‘He’s using the dream.’

King was renowned not so much for writing his speeches as assembling them from poetic fragments.

King’s demand that his children be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character?

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were ‘thick’? Did they lack talent – these people who could sing, and play, and recite and write poetry; those people who could make wonderful, beautiful things with their hands; those people who could dream dreams, see visions; those people who had such a sense of perception as to know in times so brutal, so oppressive, that they could win their way out of that by coming together? Were those people not university material? Couldn’t they have knocked off their A Levels in an afternoon? But why didn’t they get it? Was it because they were weak – those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak? Those women who could survive eleven childbearings, were they weak? Those people who could stand with their backs and their legs straight and face the people who had control over their lives, the ones who owned their workplaces and tried to own them, and tell them: ‘No. I won’t take your orders.’ Were they weak? Does anybody really think they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent, or the strength, or the endurance, or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand; no arrangement for their neighbours to subscribe to their welfare; no method by which t...

Neil Kinnock thus stands as something of a case study in the caveats that must be applied to the power of speech. Kinnock was the best public speaker in British political life in the latter part of the twentieth century. He had a command of imagery unrivalled among his contemporaries and a better speaking voice than any of them. He also had something important to say. He could be long-winded, to be sure. John Major cruelly said of Kinnock that he talked so much because, as he had no idea what he was trying to say, he could never tell when he’d finished. But there were days, magnificent days, like 11 October 1985 in Bournemouth and 15 May 1987 in Llandudno, when Kinnock knew exactly what he was trying to say and he said it with a power matched by none of his peers. It was still not enough. Magnificent though this speech was, it could not mask the facts. Rhetoric never does, at least not for long. THE PHILOSOPHICAL

‘This is a doctrine which ought to be easy of comprehension in a great commercial centre like this. You cannot trade with men who suspect you. You cannot establish commercial and industrial relations with those who do not trust you. Good will is the forerunner of trade, and trade is the great amicable instrument of the world on that account.’

know that men are won over less by the written than by the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers.’ He worked deep into the night, occupying three

secretaries at a time in a bid to get the words right. He practised his body language and gestures in front of a mirror. Hitler knew that his command of the audience was his principal method. But other people can do this. Hitler possessed no demonic quality in his rhetoric or his public speaking that marks him out from anyone else. The demon lay in his thinking. It was the poison in the ideology that sends people, without so much as a second thought, to their deaths. Hitler bragged in this speech that nobody could call him a coward. In fact he was. He never visited a concentration camp. He let others do the vicious work. He knew that his words carried authority. Rhetoric was never more dangerous, and in the 5,000 speeches he gave, Hitler spoke himself into eternal

My dear fellow citizens. For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly. Entire branches of industry are producing goods that are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need. A state which calls itself a workers’ state humiliates and exploits workers. Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available. A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world. We have polluted the soil, rivers and forests bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adults in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships. Only a few of us were able to cry out loudly that the powers that be should not be all-powerful and that the special farms, which produced ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools, children’s homes and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.

had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators. Why do I say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last forty years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed to us. On the

we accept it as such we will understand that it is up to us all and up to us alone to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue,

but also because it would blunt the duty that each of us faces today: namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly. Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would be wrong to ex...

Having charged the citizens of Czechoslovakia with complicity in their fate, Havel compliments them, almost in contradiction, with having the strength of purpose to rebel. This speech is a bit like Philip Larkin’s description of the English

Silence is not an option, as the example of Elie Wiesel shows. Indifference is perilous. As Camus puts it: ‘To keep quiet is to allow yourself to believe that you have no opinions, that you want nothing, and in certain cases it amounts to really wanting nothing.’

We need to be clear about what it is we want and we need to speak up for it. We

want the legitimate popular government defined by Thomas Jefferson. We should be prepared to defend it with all the tenacity and eloquence of Winston Churchill. We want a national community in which we take the same pride as Jawaharlal Nehru took in the midnight’s children of Indian independence. We want the recognition of the equal moral worth of all individuals that Martin Luther King expressed so beautifully, and we want, like Elie Wiesel, to live a life in the presence of hope. For all their manifold differences, and the terrible beauty of their rhetoric, the revolutionary cases of Robespierre, Hitler and Castro ho...

These temptations can be avoided, but only if we restate, in the finest words that can be uttered on a public podium, the strength and beauty of the political virtues.

the culture of modern politics has become trivially aggressive: ‘How

we

urged them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you ...