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

“Even hackneyed and commonplace maxims are to be used, if they suit one's purpose: just because they are commonplace, every one seems to agree with them, and therefore they are taken for truth.”
― Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle

“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

“I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader's Edition

“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)

“A bigot is a stone-deaf orator.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“The maxim, as has been already said, is a general statement, and people love to hear stated in general terms what they already believe in some particular connexion: e.g. if a man happens to have bad neighbors or bad children, he will agree with any one who tells him 'Nothing is more annoying than having neighbors,' or, 'Nothing is more foolish than to be the parent of children.' The orator has therefore to guess the subjects on which his hearers really hold views already, and what those views are, and then must express, as general truths, these same views on these same subjects. This is one advantage of using maxims.”
― Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle

“These are the three things—volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm—that a speaker bears in mind. It is those who do bear them in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests; and just as in drama the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political institutions.”
― Aristotle, The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle

“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

“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

“At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.

{Alluding to William Crookes's radiometer.}”
― Philip Pullman, Northern Lights: Oxford Pt.1

“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

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

“Oratory is the highest form of music”
― Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning men from rot to rock

“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