Quotes About Oratory

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

I was always a talker. You just don't wake up one morning and say, I think I want to talk a little more.' Some are better at it than others.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

His theory of oratory, the exact opposite of the Asiatics', was simple: don't move about too much, hold your head straight, stick to the point, make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, and when you've won their sympathy, sit down quickly –

But as Cicero had long tried to convince him, a speech is a performance, not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect

Cicero's first law of rhetoric, that a speech must always contain at least one surprise.

declared Mr Marrable magniloquently;

In April, Churchill decided he should try to alter his speaking style, to make it less sonorous and Victorian, to avoid sounding pompous to younger listeners. At sixty, he was an old dog to be learning new oratorical tricks

His high, uplifting oratory during the Second World War was clearly prefigured more than thirty years earlier.

Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes.

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

Churchill's career was littered with oratorical disasters when he misjudged the audience.

If you go back and look at President Reagan's speeches, they bring you to tears almost.

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.

Grant worded his message to remove any suspicion that he spoke for a particular religious denomination. Also buried in his statement was a courageous, farsighted plea for free, universal education for black children. The laconic Grant's crusade for public education was a unique event in his presidency, the result of a riveting speech that had forced an issue on the national consciousness through powerful oratory.

He generally spoke with much animation and energy, and with considerable gesture. His mind was filled with all the learning and precedence required for the occasion, enabling him to make numerous extemporaneous speeches. He seduced the listeners with hope and provoked them with fear, leading one spectator to comment that Hamilton's harangues combine the poignancy of vinegar with the smoothness of oil.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals.

I know words. I have the best words.

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.

Lincoln enhanced the ability of his audience to hear him by his practice of speaking slowly.

Mire, mi querido amigo, sólo hay una forma de hablar bien desde la tribuna, y consiste en estar plenamente convencido, al llegar a ella, de que se es el hombre más inteligente del mundo».

A good turnout at church today. It had nothing to do with the mild weather and a desire to gossip and everything to do with my oratory skills, I am perfectly convinced. Indeed, if not for Mrs Attwood's new bonnet, I would have had the ladies' undivided attention. The gentlemen I was more certain of. They had no interest in bonnets, new or otherwise, and listened in pleasing silence, broken only by an occasional snore.