The Best Speaker I've Seen (so far)

In my junior year of high school, we invited the musician Bill Miller to come and speak to us about his life. While we were crowded into the overheated auditorium, Miller told us about his life, and his climb up through a difficult childhood and home life into his current successful career. The students at my school aren't exactly known for paying attention to the speakers, seeing as we were about a hundred teenagers sitting in a muggy room, but every person in that room was silent and attentive as they listened to him. In his speech, Miller kept a consistant sense of humor, which kept the details from dragging on, but it also contrasted with the moments that were made serious to a point where it was jarring. Not jarring in a bad way, but in a way where it upset us at the points where we he meant for us to be upset. He had his message to give, which was something along the lines of 'anything is possible' and 'reach for the sky' and all that jazz, and it was certainly delivered. All throughout the speech, he was able to affect our emotions exactly the way that he intended to with nothing more than proper word choice and the inflictions in his voice, and by the end, the audience was laughing and crying all at once. He was really able to get the audience to sympathize with him, and I personally was motivated by the end and, as he intended, for that moment, I believed that anything was possible. I think that expressing yourself and getting people to see from your point of view is an important aspect of "public speaking", so Bill Miller remains to be one of the best speakers that I've ever witnessed.