Eleanor Clift Quotes

People pay attention to what a President says, whether or not he pauses for emphasis in the right places. Sometimes they even read the text.

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

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail completely in the House of Lords.

Part of politics is redundancy. You’ve got to say the same thing over and over even if you get tired of it…not everyone has heard it.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks.

He leads a new crusade, his bald head glistening... One somehow pities him, despite his so palpable imbecilities... But let no one, laughing at him, underestimate the magic that lies in his black, malignant eye, his frayed but still eloquent voice. He can shake and inflame these poor ignoramuses as no other man among us...

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

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

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

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.

Hyperbole engaged in consciously to achieve a desired effect can be, as we have noted, a useful rhetorical tool. Indeed, its use in this manner is sometimes called "exaggeration in the service of truth." However, there's much to be said for restraint of tongue and pen, and restraint refers not only to what we say but also to how we say it. It is possible, believe it or not, to be emphatic without indulging in overstatement; it is possible to be forceful without exaggerating.

In this region declarations, speeches, words are worthless.

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

Words matter in foreign policy—even empty words.

Few orators have known how to achieve such admirable results by dint of repetition. Besides, Lenin always felt his audience. He never rose too high above its level, nor did he ever omit to descend to it at just the necessary moment, in order not to break the continuity of the hypnosis which dominated the will of his flock; and more than any one he realized that a mob is like a horse that wants to be firmly bestrode and spurred, that wants to feel the hand of a master.

Political demagogues will seek popularity by public speeches full of insult to foreign countries, and yellow journals will seek to increase their circulation by appeals to prejudice against foreigners.

… sledgehammer eloquence...

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

Here comes the orator with his flood of words and his drop or reason.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every word.

I hate speeches.

I happen to have given lots of free speeches.