George Carlin Quotes

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

Sometimes I feel like I'm a preacher as well, 'cause I can really get into an audience.

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

Most great leaders are theatrical by nature.

I could sway people with words—words that welled up within me.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

A practitioner in panegyric, or, to speak more plainly, a professor of the art of puffing.

My dad wasn't the best speaker like a Bill Clinton, or a Henry Kissinger, but he had character.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

The world is always a democracy in times of flux, and the man with the best voice will win.

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.

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.

The ability to speak well is the shortcut to distinction.

The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

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.

It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.

Eloquence dwells quite as much in the hearts of the hearers as on the lips of the orator.

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear.

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

The legal profession, politics and acting are very closely tied: the whole point is to have an idea and get it across to a listener, whether it is one person or five thousand in a hall.

There is no true orator who is not a hero.

In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.

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