great speeches of the 21st century

Robert F. Kennedy at the Sierra Club, September 10, 2005 [via Wil]:

I do 40 speeches a year in red states, and there is no difference between how Republican audiences and Democratic audiences react when they hear what this White House and this Congress are doing. There is no difference except that the Republicans come up afterward and say, “Why haven’t we ever heard of this before?” I say to them, “It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.” Eighty percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.
…
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, “Why are you doing this?” What they invariably say is, “Well, the time has come in our nation’s history where we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.” And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy.

Al Gore at the Liberty Coalition (2, video) [via bn]:

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”