Oratory Quotes

“Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”
― Frederick Douglass

“All great speakers were bad speakers at first.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory.”
― Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Short Works

“In my opinion, it was chiefly owing to their deep contemplation in their silent retreats in the days of youth that the old Indian orators acquired the habit of carefully arranging their thoughts.

They listened to the warbling of birds and noted the grandeur and the beauties of the forest. The majestic clouds—which appear like mountains of granite floating in the air—the golden tints of a summer evening sky, and the changes of nature, possessed a mysterious significance.

All of this combined to furnish ample matter for reflection to the contemplating youth.”
― Francis Assikinack (Blackbird)

“The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.”
― Joss Whedon

“I am not much given to profanity, but when I am sorely aggravated and vexed in spirit I declare to you that it comes as such a relief to me, such a solace to my troubled soul, and brings me such Heavenly peace to every now and then allow a word of phrase to escape my lips which can serve me no other earthly purpose, seemingly, other than to render emphatic my otherwise mildly expressed ideas.”
― Col. Robert G. Ingersoll

“Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.”
― Aaron Sorkin

“Unjust Discourse: To invoke solely the weaker arguments and yet triumph is a talent worth more than a hundred thousand drachmae.”
― Aristophanes, Clouds

“For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory.”
― Glenway Wescott, The Grandmothers: A Family Portrait

“Хорошо говорит тот, кто постоянно в этом практикуется («Мальтийский сокол»)”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

“The greatest words are written on hearts, not paper.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Lycurgus, who ordered that a great piece of money should be but of an inconsiderable value, on the contrary would allow no discourse to be current which did not contain in few words a great deal of useful and curious sense.”
― Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives: Volume I

“He was the vilest speaker I ever heard: vulgar, ignorant, not seeking to teach his hearers, but rather to stir in men as vulgar as himself the irrational excesses to which such people are prone; a whore among orators. Yet, when he denounced the men who were putting the City in fear, there was a kind of flame in him. He was a man so ignoble that if he remembered anything of the nature of excellence, excellence, I should think it was only so that he could taunt someone with the lack of it. He lived in spite and hate. And now he only invoked the good in the name of hatred; yet for a moment nobility glanced back at him, and made him brave. It was like seeing some mangy cur, who for years has lived on scraps and filth about the market, raising his hackles at a pack of wolves.”
― Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine

“In the world of oratory, the cunning atheist declares himself a believer so as to preserve access to the rich fund of tales from religious texts and to powerful concepts like God, fate, angels, the soul, & the afterlife.”
― Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning men from rot to rock

“It's amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“The greater a speech, the longer it can be. The longer a speech, the greater it ought to be.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Being a great writer or speaker requires the appreciation of words, and that of the limits of language.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“That you have to talk about only one thing many times does not mean that you have to say one thing many times.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Being a great writer usually deceives one into thinking that one is necessarily a good if not a great speaker.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Speech without heart is nothing but noise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“Omission is not brevity.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“For some reason, the former President failed to rise to the response of the audience to his unconscious humor. He began a phrase modestly,
"When I was in Washington," being a euphemism for
"When I was President" and the audience burst into laughter. Afterwards, he said sadly to Mrs. Coolidge:
"They seemed to be in a strange mood. I never spoke to an audience which laughed before.""
Yet a few weeks later when an enthusiastic woman Republican gurgled at him:
"Oh, Mr. Coolidge, I enjoyed your speech so much that I stood up during the whole speech. I couldn't get a seat."
Quipped Coolidge: "So did I!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“During the Second World War, the Free World’s most powerful weapon was not the atomic bomb, but Churchill’s rhetoric— while, by some accounts, it was through the mouth that Hitler shot himself.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“What a waste that so many who can think cannot speak, and so many who can speak cannot think, when, really, these two things ought to go hand in hand—or side by side, as they do in this book.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“To be a good speaker, you need to be a good thinker. To be a good thinker, you need to be a good human being. And to be a good human being, you need to love the truth and the world more than you love your sorry self.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“In Hinduism, there is this notion that the word abstracts from the object, and that Brahman or God, being the ultimate abstraction, abstracts from the word. If reason and language are what separate us from the beasts, and bring us nearer to God, we should take care not to abuse the word. Those who speak only for themselves, or, out of spite, to make trouble and undermine the human project, ought to have the insight and the decency to shut up.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“In truth, it is not for the sake of our opponents that we are arguing or debating. Often, our opponents are in any case unpersuadable, regardless of the merits of our argumentation and the polish of our performance. Instead, our true aim is to carry the audience, whom we should look upon as our judge and jury. In the long run, it is not this or that person but only public opinion that can settle a debate.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“Preparing an artful and persuasive speech is a great deal of work. For me, kairos is also a matter of whether to speak at all. You shouldn’t speak if: you have nothing worth saying; you are unsure and keep changing your mind; you are not the best or most qualified person to speak on this subject; you are speaking out of some deep-seated grievance; you are speaking only or mostly to further your own interests; speaking won’t make a difference. In his Ethics, Aristotle says that the virtuous or great-souled man (megalopsychos) ought ‘to be sluggish and hold back except where great honour or a great work is at stake, and to be a man of few deeds, but of great and notable ones.’ Remember that speech is a divine instrument. When someone goes around giving lots of little, loud speeches, you can be sure that they are an idiot.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero

“If your proof is insubstantial, you might instead begin with a vehement refutation in the hope that no one notices your lack of argument. Since Plato’s Phaedo, and even a little before, the Western mind has been marked by deep divisions or dualities, such as soul and body, mind and matter, reason and sense experience, reason and emotion, reality and appearance, good and evil, heaven and hell. This binary thinking carries over to dialectic and rhetoric, in which it is often one thing or the other, rather than both or several or neither. Thus, in the Western mind, knocking down your opponent’s argument is tantamount to validating your own. Notice that the very concept of a debate with an ‘opponent’ is confrontational, when the exercise could instead be cooperative and conversational, as in the Upanishads.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero