Louis Auchincloss Quotes

You could be the World's greatest orator and if you don't say anything while orating, they are going to walk out on you after a while.

a fair degree of literacy of speech ... is increasingly rare in politicians and not necessarily regarded as an asset.

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.

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

Never write down your speeches beforehand; if you do, you may perhaps be a good declaimer, but will never be a debater.

I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia...and...with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point.

I like that kind of stuff. I like doing speeches. I've been lucky because I've had a lot of characters, over the years, who will have three or four page speeches.

There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.

The receipt to make a speaker, and an applauded one too, is short and easy. Take common sense quantum sufficit; add a little application to the rules and orders of the House [of Commons], throw obvious thoughts in a new light, and make up the whole with a large quantity of purity, correctness and elegancy of style. Take it for granted that by far the greatest part of mankind neither analyze nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface.

The orator is thereby an orator that keeps his feet ever on a fact.

You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.

A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience.

Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! they say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else's small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quite remarkable, it doesn't need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality!

When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.

The things that mount the rostrum with a skip, And then skip down again, pronounce a text, Cry hem; and reading what they never wrote Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work, And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!

An orator is a good man who is skilled in speaking.

Republicans are always criticizing President Obama for using the teleprompter. Is that a big deal? After eight years of George Bush, I'm glad we have a president that can read.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.

Learn your lines… plant your feet… look the other actor in the eye… say the words… mean them.

I've found great virtue in two-thirds of the way into the message; right before I'm really want to nail home a point, pausing to tell a joke or to tell a light-hearted story, because I know my audience has been working with me now for 20 or 25 minutes. And if I can get them to laugh, get oxygen into their system, it wakes up those who might be sleeping, so there's something about using a story to draw people back in right before you drive home your final point. In that case I think it's real legitimate just to use a story for story's sake.

The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

John Kerry spent the day reading to preschoolers ... and the kids said Kerry actually lacked warmth and failed to articulate a clear message.

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them.