Jurgen Habermas Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

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.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

I think the lawyers are such incredible actors. Can you imagine the performance they have to do every day?

You know I am an actor, and I have medals for diction.

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

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

I am a trial lawyer. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.

I got my degree in rhetoric.

I think one of the mistakes actors make is we're so focused on what we're going to say.

[William Jennings Bryan] thinks that to say something is to do something, which is an imperfect view of administration.

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable …

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.

Commonly they must use their feet for defense whose only weapon is their tongue.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

If you can hear music, you can hear the musicality of the way someone speaks. It's easier to nail down the way that they talk. So much of it is listening, just like in acting. If you're listening, you pick up the nuance of why a person behaves the way that they behave.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

In the daytime, I was studying at school and in the evenings, I was a stage kid. I was trained in theatre and public speaking. I was a really active kid.

I always saw law as a performance, just like being on a stage.

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

My Father taught me to weigh my words carefully, and speak up only when I had something insightful to add to the proceedings, or something really funny to say. He also taught me that if I couldn’t be that kind of guy in real life, that I could earn a healthy living pretending to be that guy in the movies – particularly when paired up with a long haired stoner.

I realized, "Oh my god, this is an enormous play. And it's almost all me. Big. big chunks of speeches, speeches, speeches." And I started to panic.

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.