Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

I had no fear of speaking to large audiences.

As any speaker will tell you, when you address a large number of people from a stage, you try to make eye contact with people in the audience to communicate that you're accessible and interested in them.

Sen. McCain isn't someone who strikes you as a particularly dynamic speaker. He doesn't seem to like the formality of giving speeches. He clearly isn't too comfortable reading off a TelePrompter.

Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed.

I usually never walk by a microphone.

A lot of people think that public speaking means that you are standing at a podium giving a speech, but public speaking comes in lots of different formats.

I can move any crowd.

There were people that grabbed you just by talking, and that's what I loved about professional wrestling when I started out. That's why I'm already so good. That's why people literally hang on the edge of their seats when I have a mic because they want to know what I'm going to say.

My dad was just so charismatic and witty. One day, I hope people say that I was just as good as my dad on the mic in my own way. I will never be saying 'Space Mountain' or 'limousine riding,' but I hope people say I can control an audience, that I was as captivating as him.

I was worried that my voice would struggle with talking nonstop every night, but it's been fine.

I'll never forget my first moment of looking out on a convention audience with my mouth open like they were kidding me.

For some reason, talking is easy for me. Practice does make perfect; I've been doing it for a while. Being out there in a high-pressure situation with a live audience and a live TV camera on you, it brings something out. It's very organic.

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.

I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.

I wonder what my speech would be.

I know, indeed, and can conceive of no pursuit so antagonistic to the cultivation of the oratorical faculty ... as the study of Mathematics. An eloquent mathematician must, from the nature of things, ever remain as rare a phenomenon as a talking fish, and it is certain that the more anyone gives himself up to the study of oratorical effect the less will he find himself in a fit state to mathematicize.

I like that kind of stuff. I like doing speeches. I've been lucky because I've had a lot of characters, over the years, who will have three or four page speeches.

He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.

When I'm speaking in front of 15 and 20,000 people and I'm up there using a lot of motion, I guess in it's own way, it's a pretty healthy act. I really enjoy doing it. A lot of times these rooms are very hot, like saunas, and I guess that is a form of exercise and, you know?

Why would you get up there and bore people? I never have figured that out. These people are supposedly in the entertainment industry, and they finally get up there to that podium and they become the most boring people in the world.

Occasionally, once a speaker is on his feet, it is difficult to get him to sit down. ... If and when he returns to earth, he notices half of the room is paging the other half and a few are playing with the melted candles.

If it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice.

I didn't want to change my personality onstage, but I still had to build some kind of ego to be able to go up there. If not, there's no point.

The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it.

The things that mount the rostrum with a skip, And then skip down again, pronounce a text, Cry hem; and reading what they never wrote Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work, And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!