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Watch Inspiring Activist and Protest Speeches

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Introduction

This article compiles inspiring and impactful activist and protest speeches that have driven social change. It features speeches from influential figures addressing civil rights, climate justice, gender equality, and more. This collection of speeches aims to showcase how powerful rhetoric can ignite movements and mobilize communities towards collective action and positive change.

Each speech exemplifies the potency of public oratory in challenging injustices and advocating for a better world.

The speeches are organised chronologically by year from the most recent to the past. Please contact us if you have one to add to the list.

Watch Videos

John Boyega George Floyd Black Lives Matter #BLM Protest Speech: Star Wars Actor’s Powerful Hyde Park (London) Message, 2020

Some of you are artists. Some of you are bankers. Some of you are lawyers. Some of you own shop stores, you are important. Your individual power, your individual right is very, very important. We can all join together to make this a better world. We can all do it together to make this special. We can all join together. – John Boyega

Greta Thunberg, “How Dare You?”, UN Climate Action Summit, 2019

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you! – Greta Thunberg

Greta Thunberg (15 years old) You Are Stealing Our Future, COP 24, Poland, 2018

We have not come here to beg world leaders to care. You have ignored us in the past and you will ignore us again. We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time. We have come here to let you know that change is coming, whether you like it or not. The real power belongs to the people. – Greta Thunberg

X Gonzalez’s Powerful March for Our Lives, 2018 [Ending gun violence]

Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job. – X Gonzalez

Judith Heumann, Our Fight for Disability Rights – and Why We’re Not Done Yet, 2016

But I was learning as my friends were, and people I didn’t know around the country, that we had to be our own advocates, that we needed to fight back people’s view that if you had a disability, you needed to be cured, that equality was not part of the equation. And we were learning from the Civil Rights Movement and from the Women’s Rights Movement. We were learning from them about their activism and their ability to come together, not only to discuss problems but to discuss solutions. And what was born is what we call today the Disability Rights Movement. – Judith Heumann

Malala Yousafzai: Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, 2014

So let us bring equality, justice and peace for all. Not just the politicians and the world leaders, we all need to contribute. Me. You. It is our duty. So we must work … and not wait. I call upon my fellow children to stand up around the world. Dear sisters and brothers, let us become the first generation to decide to be the last. The empty classrooms, the lost childhoods, wasted potential-let these things end with us. – Malala Yousafzai

Elie Wiesel, The Perils of Indifference, 1999 [Holocaust survivor]

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. – Elie Wiesel

Maya Angelou Performs her Inspiring Poem ‘Still I Rise’, 1987 [Civil Rights Activist…the Power of Resisting Marginalization]

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. – Maya Angelou

The Last Words of Harvey Milk, 1978

I cannot prevent some people from feeling angry and frustrated and mad in response to my death, but I hope they will take the frustration and madness and instead of demonstrating or anything of that type, I would hope that they would take the power and I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out, stand up and let the world know. That would do more to end prejudice overnight than anybody could imagine. I urge them to do that, urge them to come out. Only that way will we start to achieve our rights. … All I ask is for the movement to continue, and if a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door… – Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk, Give Them Hope, 1978

I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you have got to give them hope. – Harvey Milk

Nelson Mandela, I Am Prepared To Die, 1964

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. – Nelson Mandela

Martin Luther King, I Have A Dream Speech at the March on Washington, 1963

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. – Martin Luther King

Harold Macmillan, The Wind of Change, 1960 [Racial discrimination, slavery]

An address given to the Parliament of South Africa on 3 February 1960 in Cape Town, as the UK government began to grant independence to what were British Colonies.

The wind of change is blowing through this continent and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. And we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it…For as time passes and one generation yields to another, human problems change and fade. Let us therefore resolve to build and not to destroy, and let us also remember that weakness comes from division, and in words familiar to you, strength from unity. – Harold Macmillan

Eleanor Roosevelt, The Struggle for Human Rights, 1948

We know the patterns of totalitarianism — the single political party, the control of schools, press, radio, the arts, the sciences, and the church to support autocratic authority; these are the age-old patterns against which men have struggled for three thousand years. These are the signs of reaction, retreat, and retrogression. The United Nations must hold fast to the heritage of freedom won by the struggle of its people; it must help us to pass it on to generations to come…The development of the ideal of freedom and its translation into the everyday life of the people in great areas of the earth is the product of the efforts of many peoples. It is the fruit of a long tradition of vigorous thinking and courageous action. – Eleanor Roosevelt

Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or Death, 1913 [Women’s suffrage]

Human life for us is sacred, but we say if any life is to be sacrificed it shall be ours; we won’t do it ourselves, but we will put the enemy in the position where they will have to choose between giving us freedom or giving us death. – Emmeline Pankhurst

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