Nikita Khrushchev spoke to the Soviet Party Congress for four hours, and Fidel Castro spoke to the UN General Assembly for four and a half hours.  Krishna Menon spoke to the UN Security Council for eight hours, Strom Thurmond filibustered for twenty-four hours, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk spoke to the Turkish Parliament for thirty-six hours over six days.  These speeches are so long that they are remembered as easily-summarized events rather than as complex messages, and their performance becomes an enduring characteristic powerful enough to efface their own spoken content.  This paper focuses on the phenomenon of the excessively long speech, exploring the ways in which extended oratory marks the limits of discourse and transforms the rhetorical structures of speech.