Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan

Nobody wants to hear long speeches.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

I could sway people with words—words that welled up within me.

Nature has ordained that the man who is pleading his own cause before a large audience, will be more readily listened to than he who has no object in view other than the public benefit.

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

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.

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

The aim of forensic oratory is to teach, to delight, to move.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

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

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Making clever speeches takes a lot of work and a lot of time.

A great speech is literature.

Look, I debate for a living so I don't need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.