Quotes About Oratory

We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It's rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it's all just a way to bend others to your will.

Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.

I know that fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.

Ero uno che a scuola imparava presto e bene ma che per il resto era assai riottoso... il genitore non sapeva apprezzare il talento oratorio del suo litigioso rampollo, e men che meno ne traeva conclusioni favorevoli circa il suo avvenire, neppure riusciva a comprendere quest'alto suo ideale giovanile. Molto preoccupato, egli osservava tale contrasto della natura del figliolo

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.

The power of Nature predominates over the human will in all works of even the fine arts, in all that respects their material and external circumstanees. Nature paints the best part of the picture, carves the best part of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.

After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate. When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, "for Buncombe County." Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory "buncombe"—or "bunk" for short.

No man not inspired can make a good speech without preparation

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory.

No man not inspired can make a good speech without preparation.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

A good orator must be a good listener

if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. Do you remember, Stevenson said, that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

There is an atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it

The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.

An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say Gentlemen to the person with whom he is conversing.

Being very, very honest, I've watched more Bill Clinton speeches than stand-up specials. Steve Jobs commencements. They're just great orators. I love people who boldly share their point of view.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by . . . swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.

the inundation of the average American's consciousness with profit-driven spectacles and images would not come until after the Civil War. Before the war, Americans attended to oratory with a seriousness and eagerness that would be frittered away with the advent of "show business," a term introduced in 1850 but not widely used until the late sixties.

Yo dedico un capítulo entero al elegante método de Cicerón, que consta de cinco pasos para la construcción de un discurso (invención, organización, estilo, memoria y ejecución)

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.