William Lloyd Garrison Quotes

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

No man pleases by silence; many I please by speaking briefly.

Do not say a little in many words but a great deal in a few.

The gifts of nature are necessary; but they are not sufficient to make a complete orator without art and study.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

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.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Genuine good taste consists in saying much in few words, in choosing among our thoughts, in having order and arrangement in what we say, and in speaking with composure.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

The finest command of language is often shown by saying nothing.

Vigorous writing is concise.

I believe most things can be said in a few lines.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

Words must be weighed, not counted.

If you cannot say what you have to say in 20 minutes, you should go away and write a book about it.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

Say only a little but say it well.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Less is almost always better than more. Short words, short sentences, short speeches.

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.