Top 100 Quotes About Oratory
#1. Stephen Douglas's oratory was designed for the galleries, Lincoln's for his peers
Harold Holzer
#2. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,
a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.
Henry David Thoreau
#3. 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.
Henry Clay
#4. Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place.
Aaron Sorkin
#5. 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.
Noam Chomsky
#6. The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.
John Vinocur
#7. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#9. The nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear - fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory turns easily to rage, hate, and violence.
Joseph Conrad
#10. Hark to that shrill, sudden shout,
The cry of an applauding multitude,
Swayed by some loud-voiced orator who wields
The living mass as if he were its soul!
William C. Bryant
#11. A speech should not just be a sharing of information, but a sharing of yourself.
Ralph Archbold
#12. 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
#13. Its Constitution
the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.
Rufus Choate
#14. The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.
Ben Jonson
#15. Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever.
Isocrates
#16. When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of Oratory, he answered, "Action," and which was the second, he replied, "action," and which was the third, he still answered "Action.
Plutarch
#17. God looks not at the oratory of your prayers, how elegant they may be; nor at the geometry of your prayers, how long they may be; nor at the arithmetic of your prayers, how many they may be; not at logic of your prayers, how methodical they may be; but the sincerity of them he looks at.
Thomas Brooks
#18. Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#20. Hitler's oratory moved people and appealed to their hopes and dreams. But his speeches malevolently twisted hope into some gnarled ghastly entities, and appealed to the latent, darkest prejudices of Germans.
Richard M Perloff
#22. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.
Mortimer J. Adler
#23. Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!
Winston Churchill
#24. I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth.
Mark Twain
#25. Let us never forget that, to be profited, that is, to be spiritually improved in knowledge, faith, holiness, joy and love, is the end of hearing sermons, and not merely to have our taste gratified by genius, eloquence and oratory.
John Angell James
#26. Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
David Josiah Brewer
#27. I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.
Margot Asquith
#29. The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
#30. Women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea.
Anna Julia Cooper
#31. The Montgomery bus boycott would have happened without King, but King's oratory helped to ensure that the boycott came one of those exceptional local movements for justice that would send ripples of inspiration to oppressed people everywhere.
Troy Jackson
#32. Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that.
Mark Twain
#33. 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!
David Josiah Brewer
#34. Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.
Brooks Hays
#35. The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.
Thomas Carlyle
#36. Very good orators, when they are out, they will spit; and for lovers, lacking
God warn us!
matter, the cleanliest shift is to kiss.
William Shakespeare
#37. Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#38. I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.
Noam Chomsky
#41. The loudmouthed pervert loudly, pervertedly, strode in, spewing his loud, perverted oratory the entire way. It
Satoshi Wagahara
#42. Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must.
Claude C. Hopkins
#43. There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea.
Stephen Fry
#44. None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#45. The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.
Joss Whedon
#47. In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#49. In oratory affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn.
Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert Of Cherbury
#50. 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
#51. Why do you rant and brag with such a spate of words, as if you wanted to overwhelm me with a sort of tempest and deluge of oratory-which nevertheless falls with the greater force on your own head, while my ark rides aloft in safety?
Martin Luther
#52. Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion.
Aristotle.
#53. Thence to the famous orators repair, Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will that fierce democratie, Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece, To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne.
John Milton
#54. It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test of an orator's control of his audience to be able to land them again on the solid earth of sober thinking.
Russell H. Conwell
#57. There is nothing like oratory, it is a skill that can turn a commoner into a king.
Winston Churchill
#58. Earlier on I said something so lucidly philosophical that my oratory rambled non-stop right into expressing amazement I had just said that.
Beth Myrle Rice
#59. There is an atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it!
Albert Einstein
#60. 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.
#61. Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#63. 265. "Let the oratory be what it is called, and let nothing else be done or stored there. When the work of God is finished, let all go out with the deepest silence and let reverence be shown to God."~
St. Benedict
#65. The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.
Woodrow Wilson
#66. Inspiring leadership communication is not about great oratory or great charisma; rather it is about getting others to believe in themselves and believe in your cause, and then achieve more than they thought was possible.
Kevin Murray
#67. When we preach or teach the Scriptures, we open the door for the Holy Spirit to do His work. God has not promised to bless oratory or clever preaching. He has promised to bless His Word.
Billy Graham
#68. ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.
Ambrose Bierce
#69. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#70. When a world of men
Could not prevail with all their oratory,
Yet hath a woman's kindness overrul'd;
William Shakespeare
#71. It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.
Jonathan Swift
#73. In oratory the will must predominate.
David Hare
#74. I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of women in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#77. Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.
Kurt Vonnegut
#78. Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.
Isaac Watts
#79. Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.
Woodrow Wilson
#80. 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.
Charles Horton Cooley
#81. 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.
Henry Purcell
#82. Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said]
Mark Logue
#83. It makes a great difference whether Davus or a hero speaks.
Horace
#84. Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.
Samuel Johnson
#85. Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.
Elbert Hubbard
#89. Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
Sinclair Lewis
#90. The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.
Isaac D'Israeli
#91. Oratory is the art of making a loud noise sound like a deep thought.
Bennett Cerf
#92. My mum's getting married," said Cheryl. "Again. At the Brompton Oratory. Fourth time around the track, this is. They don't say 'Till death us do part' for my mum; they say 'Who's holding ticket number twenty-three?
Mike Carey
#93. Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
Emily Post
#94. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.
Thomas Jefferson
#95. 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.
Aldous Huxley
#96. I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.
Sinclair Lewis
#97. Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.
Elihu Burritt
#98. When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'
Plutarch
#99. Thucydides, distrusting the clever oratory in the popular assembly, saw a frustrated populace gullibly following those orators who promised solutions which at first sight were pleasant but eventually disastrous. Both
Ernst Breisach
#100. I may not be skilled at eloquent oratory , but for muttering angrily under one's breath, I have never met a more capable man.
Eli Brown
