Theodore C. Sorensen Quotes

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.

I've learned to mumble with great incoherence.

word thrower … phrase maker

Accent [emphasis] is the soul of speech; it gives it feeling and truth.

When the public doesn't understand me, it's a battle. So when I choose words, I choose them for their musicality, rhythm, and sense, and I choose the right dialect to express that.

Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump.

Personally, just as an actor, I love accents; they're fun.

How nice the human voice is when it isn't singing.

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

False eloquence is exaggeration; true eloquence is emphasis.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.

Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.

Some people compose their thoughts in front of a typewriter but I find that I am better at composing my thoughts in front of an audience.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

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.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.

When I write, I'm talking to myself constantly to make sure that it sounds OK; it has kind of a nice rhythm and a nice jump to it.

Tone is everything.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren't a little flower somebody sewed on.