Skip to main content

Once more into the breach…

Dear friends…once more

The Fallon blog has an excellent post featuring rousing motivational speeches that have appeared in film.

Among them are the likes of General Patton (aka George C Scott) and the Spartan captain from 300 (which I have yet to see).

I added a suggestion in the comments - the St Crispians Day speech from Henry V by Shakespeare - performed by Richard Branagh (who ranks up there with Baz Lurhman for making The Bard bearable).



Let's make a list:

What are the most rousing speeches ever?

Martin Luther King - I have a dream

JFK - Ask not what your country can do...


...What happened to oratory?

have we become too cynical? Too postmodern?

Recommend your favourites...

We'll come back to this.

Comments

  1. Anonymous11:39 am

    Now how is this for obscure....
    Eliear Ben Yair, leader of the Zealots oles up atop Herod's fortress at Masada. After three years uner seige by the best of the Roman Empire, and with the next day sure to bring the final breach of the walls, he adressed his people. He asked them to make a choice between capture by the Romans, or choosing their own destiny and dyng, by their own hand, as free men. While his words are lost for all time, Josephus Flavius' reports indicate the tone of what must have been said.

    Now that is rosing and, leaving aside our thought about modern Israel, it created a nationhood exemplified in the line "Masada shall not fall again"

    ReplyDelete
  2. JoeGreenz8:39 pm

    Thanks Ben, I've never really thought about where the term zealot came from.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St
Post a Comment
Read more and leave a comment

Ze Frank thinks so you don't have to

Ze Frank appeared on my radar when I saw his presentation among the excellent TED Talks videos . This morning I was reading Russell Davies planning blog in which he referred to a clip by Ze Frank - Where do ideas come from. Here's the transcript: "...Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima [sic] writes, "Are you ever gonna break into song again? Are you running out of ideas?" Hungry Hippo licks Aunt JEmima, that's a good question. I run out of ideas every day! Each day I live in mortal fear that I've used up the last idea that'll ever come to me. If you don't wanna run out of ideas the best thing to do is not to execute them. You can tell yourself that you don't have the time or resources to do 'em right. Then they stay around in your head like brain crack. No matter how bad things get, at least you have those good ideas that you'll get to later. Some people get addicted to that brain crack. And the longer they wait, the more they convince themse
1 comment
Read more and leave a comment

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer
9 comments
Read more and leave a comment