Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

A great speech is literature.

I am not eloquent.

In an easy matter. Anybody can be eloquent.

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

If you can talk, you can write.

I enjoy my public speaking. That's what I love doing. It's what I'm good at.

I [Moses] am not a man of words.

word thrower … phrase maker

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech.

Always, with speeches, I feel like it's an opportunity to say something.

Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot.

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

The writing is all done, so it's all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there's a bit of politics involved, so it's a different thing.

With my natural communication abilities, I could probably gather a crowd even without the Spirit.

I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.

In a perfect world, I would never give another speech, address, talk, lecture or whatever as long as I live.

When a man is asked to make a speech, the first thing he has to decide is what to say.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.

I got my degree in rhetoric.

I look at myself more as a storyteller than a screenwriter, as pretentious as that may sound, but that's what really attracts me to TED Talks. For me, the really effective ones are being presented by expert storytellers.