Speakers
The list of notable speakers and speeches numbers in the thousands and includes domestic and foreign political and military leaders, Nobel prize-winning scientists, authors, activists, and artists. A book of important club speeches, Each a Mighty Voice, was published in 2004 by Heyday Books.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his New Deal speech at the club. While in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke at the club, as did Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. During his term as Vice President, Dan Quayle delivered his famous Murphy Brown speech to the group. One recent live "Address to the Club" was a wide-ranging discussion with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the end of her 2010 trip to the Balkans. Other major recent speakers include California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, former secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, James Baker, and Madeleine Albright; California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; authors Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Greg Mortenson; microcredit entrepreneur and Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus; historian Victor Davis Hanson; airline pilot Chesley Sullenberger; CIA Director Leon Panetta; former U.S. Comptroller General and Peter Peterson Foundation President David Walker, and business leaders Richard Kovacevich and David O'Reilly.
Growing out of Study Sections that were formed in the club's early days, today the club has fifteen ongoing member-led fora, each of which meets frequently to host speakers and engage in discussion on topics including the arts, bay gourmet (food and wine), Asia-Pacific affairs, business and leadership, environment and natural resources, grownups (second half of life issues), health and medicine, humanities, international relations, LGBT issues, the Middle East, personal growth, psychology, and science and technology.
An intensive look at a single subject is sponsored each August through the Club's Platforum, where events are held daily throughout the month on the topic, examined from the perspective of many different fields. Annual Platforum topics have included China Rising (2006), Cool Clear Water (2007), How We Eat (2008), For Richer, for Poorer: Surviving and Thriving in the Great Recession (2009), and The Ascent of Woman (2010). The Platforum series include not just lectures and discussions, but often meals, travel, and experiential learning such as kayaking on San Francisco Bay (Cool Clear Water).
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Famous quotes containing the word speakers:
“What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
The only speakers of essential truth,
Opposed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths;...
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
—Njabulo Ndebele (b. 1948)
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)