William Gibbs McAdoo Quotes

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

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

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

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

The nature of politics is to subtract meaning from language.

The speaking in perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but love.

The mediocrity of his [Winston Churchill's] thinking is concealed by the majesty of his language.... He mistakes verbal facilities for mental inspiration.

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.

Nothing is more despicable than a professional talker who uses his words as a quack uses remedies.

This trial has developed in the most remarkable manner, the insane love of speaking among public men. We are wading knee deep in words, words, words ….

Orrin Hatch has a five pound tongue in a four pound head.

Charitably, you could say it was a little long. In fact, it was a lot long.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.

Together we must rise to ever higher and higher platitudes.

On Capitol Hill we like to make tough speeches. We don’t like to make tough choices.

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

A typical vice of American politics — the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues, and the announcement of radical policies with much sound and fury, and at the same time with a cautious accompaniment of weasel phrases each of which sucks the meat out of the preceding statement.

In this region declarations, speeches, words are worthless.

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.

Nobody wants to hear long speeches.

A sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.

He spoke with more eloquence than wisdom.