Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas.

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas.

Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his 'being different' gets in the way.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

They look for the top note to end every song. They don't know what they are singing about. There is no style.

The man [President Woodrow Wilson] has no sense of things that penetrates below the surface. With him the rhetoric of a thing is the thing itself.

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

Trump has words, but there's not really any depth there.

Too often, campaigns are all flash and no substance.

I like it when people have good flow, but I also like it when people actually say stuff. Because sometimes that's a very good distraction, like, to have impeccable flow, but you're saying a lot without saying anything.

Unfortunately, he was about as deep as a melted ice cube.

I believe that we have better ideas. But I also believe that good ideas don't matter if people don't hear them.

Neil Kinnock's speeches go on for so long because he has nothing to say and so he has no way of knowing when he's finished saying it.

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.

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

His words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.

The mere wit is only a human bauble. He is to life what bells are to horses-not expected to draw the load, but only to jingle while the horses draw.

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points.

The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.

The idea of inclusion has become kind of a stone that we've passed our hand over so many times that it doesn't mean anything.

If all you've got is somebody else's stuff that you've lifted, nothing really deep, then it is going to thin out.

I've known him since 1954 and I've never taken Mujib Rahiman seriously - I understood from the very first moment that there was no depth to him, no preparation, that he was an agitator breathing a lot of fire and with an absolute lack of ideas.

There's nothing to Obama - nothing but platitudes. When it's time to get to the substance, we get contradictions and confusions. We don't think that he knows what he's talking about because it's true: He doesn't.

Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.