Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Extemporaneous speaking should be practised and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public.

I cannot write a speech. The pen is an extinguisher upon my mind and a torture to my nerves. I am the most habitual extemporaneous speaker that I have ever known.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

I got on the high school speech team and everyday I would get up in front of the class and just start talking.

We had an exercise in speech class in school, impromptu speaking, that I was always real good at.

Speeches are much easier if you read them. I just find when I do that, it's harder to fire up the crowd.

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

Bush is a very poor impromptu speaker. He does fine in small groups but when speaking without a script in front of large groups or answering questions he wasn't prepped for, he has problems.

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

The law as a profession has provided me with more satisfaction than I ever dreamed.

I am not a speaker. The more you do it, the easier it becomes, but I always want to be prepared, and I always practice my speeches; I never do it off the cuff.

I consider myself a pretty good extemporaneous speaker. Even though I don't like speaking in front of people, I don't think I'm bad at it.

Public Speaking is a skill that can be studied, polished, perfected. Not only can you get good at it, you can get damn good at it and it makes a heck of a difference.

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.

Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.

The legal profession is a business with a tremendous collection of egos. Few people who are not strong egotistically gravitate to it.

You never write a speech in advance because if you don't get to use it, you'll be heartbroken.

There are few things that will take you further in life, than your ability to make a good presentation.

It's important to look people in the eye and have direct conversations. I actually have a rule that if an issue takes more than five sentences to explain it, don't send an email. Pick up the phone instead, because it'll take less time to resolve it.

I think I have a good rapport with the people I work with and that really helps. If you like working with people and you always have a good time and you always do good work, then they're going to book you again. I like doing what I do.

Most people, when they talk fast, they get flat.

You have to be able to communicate in life and probably schools underemphasize that. If you can't talk to people or write, you're giving up your potential.

Throughout my academic career, I'd given some pretty good talks. But being considered the best speaker in the computer science department is like being known as the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs.

Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.