10 speeches that made history.

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"A SPEECH IS POETRY: CADENCE, RHYTHM, IMAGERY, SWEEP!" said Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan. "A speech reminds us that words ... have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart."

Indeed, when written and delivered well, speeches can change minds, stir people to action (both positive and negative), and even alter the course of history. Here are excerpts from some of America's most important speeches, why they mattered in their time--and why they still resonate today.

'Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!'

Patrick Henry

March 23, 1775

Fed up with Great Britain's increasingly oppressive measures against its American colonies, the fiery Virginia lawyer Patrick Henry gave this speech to delegates at the Second Virginia Convention, in Richmond, urging them to organize a I militia to fight. The United States declared its independence a year later and won it in 1783, after seven years of war.

"There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable--and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, 'Peace! Peace!'--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others k may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"

Download Patrick Henry's full speech at upfrontmagazine.com

'We Now Demand Our Right to Vote'

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

July 19, 1848

Ratified in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote. In many ways, the road to women's suffrage began with this speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 72 years earlier, at the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention in New York.

"[W]e are assembled to protest against a form of government existing without the consent of the governed-to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love; laws which make her the mere dependent on his bounty. It is to protest against such unjust laws as these that we are assembled today, and to have them, if possible, forever erased from our statute books, deeming them a shame and a disgrace to a Christian republic in the 19th century. We have met to uplift woman's fallen divinity upon an even pedestal with man's. And, strange as it may seem to many, we now demand our right to vote according to the declaration of the government under which we live."

'Fourscore and Seven Years Ago ...'

Abraham Lincoln Nov. 19, 1863

The Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania (July 1-3, 1863) was one of the most costly of the Civil War (1861-65), leaving 50,000 dead, wounded, or missing on the Union and Confederate sides. Dedicating the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg four months later, President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. At fewer than 300 words, it's one of history's briefest--but most memorable--speeches, and it gave the nation a "new birth of freedom."

"Fourscore 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 I battlefield 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.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here....

[W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

'I Will Fight No More Forever'

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, Oct. 5, 1877

Seventeen years after gold was discovered on Nez Perce lands in Oregon and whites began settling it, the U.S. government ordered the Indians to...