Leo Rosten Quotes

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here so nobly advanced.

Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address - while every night it takes six guys to write this crap!

The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

The majority of U.S. high school students don't know within 50 years when the Civil War occurred.

There is no disputing that Lincoln was a great man.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

All quiet along the Potomac.

You say it best, when you say nothing at all.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

The American Civil War was the wrangling of two armed mobs.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he turned the Civil War into a revolution.

I've been to Gettysburg probably more than half a dozen times.

In 1961, an official U.S. commission oversaw thousands of events to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the American Civil War. All 50 states joined in, but not surprisingly, the biggest events took place in the 11 southern states that made up the defeated Confederacy.

Abe Lincoln is my favorite president of all time - and he pulls off that top hat pretty well.

The American war of 1861-65 is recent enough to be embedded still in cultural memory.

I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.

When I read that I had to go to Gettysburg.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

Eloquence is a painting of thought; and thus those who, after having painted it, add something more, make a picture instead of a portrait.

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.

It is the heart which inspires eloquence.