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Words are a powerful tool for change.

From civil rights and the gay liberation movement to climate change and education activism, speeches have hugely impacted the world we live in today. �鶹�� Bitesize looks at four speeches that drove positive changes across the world.

Greta Thunberg – Our House is On Fire

Greta Thunberg has been pivotal in the international youth movement against climate change.

On 25 January 2019, at the age of 16, she addressed the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Switzerland. Her poignant speech called for banks, firms and governments to stop investing in fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas.

She told attendees, “I often hear adults say: ‘We need to give the next generation hope.’” Before she concluded, “But I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I do. Every day. And want you to act. I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.”

That same year Thunberg coordinated protests across approximately 133 countries which saw over 1.6 million demonstrators according to event organisers. She later made a surprise appearance at Glastonbury 2022, where thousands of spectators joined chants for “climate justice!”

Harvey Milk - The Hope Speech

One of the first ever openly gay politicians in the US, Harvey Milk was known for his contributions to the gay liberation movement. In 1978 he gave a rousing speech at San Francisco’s Gay Free Day Parade, against the backdrop of Proposition 6.

Proposition 6 sought to ban gay and lesbian individuals from working in public high schools across California.

Milk’s Hope Speech called upon his “gay sisters and brothers to make the commitment to fight” against these efforts and called upon the public to re-examine American history. He concludes the speech with his wish of “Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right.”

In his short political career, Milk became a significant figure in his San Francisco constituency and for members of the LGBTQ+ community. In 2009, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Malala Yousafzai – Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

Malala Yousafzai became a global symbol in the fight for girls’ education after she was shot in 2012 for opposing Taliban restrictions on female education in Pakistan.

The activist made ripples when she became the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate at the age of 17. Her 2014 speech represented the “66 million girls who are deprived of education" and asks, “Why shouldn’t they have this right to go to school?"

She rounded off her Nobel lecturer with, “Let this be the last time that a girl or a boy spends their childhood in a factory. Let this be the last time that a girl is forced into early child marriage. Let this be the last time that a child loses life in war. Let this be the last time that we see a child out of school. Let this end with us. Let’s begin this ending . . . together . . . today . . . right here, right now. Let’s begin this ending now.”

Malala was the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize. Previous recipients of the award include former US president, Barack Obama, and former South African president, Nelson Mandela.

Martin Luther King Jr. – I Have a Dream

“I have a dream,” the US civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King declared to a crowd of over 250,000 supporters from the steps of Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”

On 28 August 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, King delivered what is considered among the most important speeches in American history. Although the address totalled 17 minutes long, it is best remembered for its final few minutes, where King paints an inspiration picture of a unified America.

In the wake of the speech and march, the then-president John F. Kennedy and his administration were put under pressure to advance civil rights legislation in Congress.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into US federal law in 1983 and took effect three years later. The holiday takes place on the third Monday of January each year and commemorates the life and work of the Baptist minister and activist.

This article was published July 2022