Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by Unknown

independence.
    Perhaps you wonder how this could come about? Perhaps you have heard “them”—the wavers of the future—cry, with calculated malice, that even if Britain were defeated we could live alone and defend ourselves single-handed, even against the whole world.
    I tell you that this is a cold-blooded lie.
    We would be alone in the world, facing an unscrupulous military-economic bloc that would dominate all of Europe, all of Africa, most of Asia, and perhaps even Russia and South America. Even to do that, we would have to spend most of our national income on tanks and guns and planes and ships. Nor would this be all. We would have to live perpetually as an armed camp, maintaining a huge standing army, a gigantic air force, two vast navies. And we could not do this without endangering our freedom, our democracy, our way of life….
    We should be clear on this point. What is convulsing the world today is not merely another old-fashioned war. It is a counterrevolution against our ideas and ideals, against our sense of justice and our human values.
    Three systems today compete for world domination. Communism, fascism,and democracy are struggling for social-economic-political world control. As the conflict sharpens, it becomes clear that the other two, fascism and communism, are merging into one. They have one common enemy, democracy. They have one common goal, the destruction of democracy.
    This is why this war is not an ordinary war. It is not a conflict for markets or territories. It is a desperate struggle for the possession of the souls of men….
    No, liberty never dies. The Genghis Khans come and go. The Attilas come and go. The Hitlers flash and sputter out. But freedom endures.
    Destroy a whole generation of those who have known how to walk with heads erect in God’s free air, and the next generation will rise against the oppressors and restore freedom. Today in Europe, the Nazi Attila may gloat that he has destroyed democracy. He is wrong. In small farmhouses all over Central Europe, in the shops of Germany and Italy, on the docks of Holland and Belgium, freedom still lives in the hearts of men. It will endure like a hardy tree gone into the wintertime, awaiting the spring.
    And, like spring, spreading from the South into Scandinavia, the democratic revolution will come. And men with democratic hearts will experience comradeship across artificial boundaries.
    These men and women, hundreds of millions of them, now in bondage or threatened with slavery, are our comrades and our allies. They are only waiting for our leadership and our encouragement, for the spark that we can supply.
    These hundreds of millions of liberty-loving people, now oppressed, constitute the greatest sixth column in history. They have the will to destroy the Nazi gangsters….
    We will help brave England drive back the hordes from hell who besiege her, and then we will join for the destruction of savage and bloodthirsty dictators everywhere. But we must be firm and decisive. We must know our will and make it felt. And we must hurry.

Judge Learned Hand Evokes the Spirit of Liberty
    “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right….”
    The influential jurist with the unlikely but appropriate name Learned Hand served as presiding judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals from 1939 to 1951, and as senior judge for a decade after. Though never appointed to the Supreme Court, he was able, through his two thousand decisions, to uphold the liberty of the individual and to show that the written and the spoken word did not need the most august forum to have an impact on the law.
    Toward the end of World War II, Judge Hand spoke at an “I Am an American Day” ceremony in New York City’s Central Park. Instead of a rousing, patriotic address, he delivered a thoughtful credo that profoundly moved the audience; when his “Spirit of Liberty” speech was widely reprinted, the judge took care to add a footnote