Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

The most important thing to remember is you must know your audience.

If you don't pick your audience, you're lost because you're not really talking to anybody.

The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter, as more people have ears to be tickled than understandings to judge.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

Nobody has a magic lamp which can tell you in advance whether what you say will be effective in persuading an audience.

The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product.

You have to be aware of who you're talking to in an audience.

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

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.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

The bully pulpit is not an open microphone. You have to target it very carefully.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

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

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

In a world where audiences listen for attitudes rather than arguments or information, speakers must feel the pressure to posture rather than engage.

I approach my interviews with the mindset of, exactly what are we selling? How can I sell it the hardest and the most effectively in the fewest words possible? And how can I make each word that I say mean as much as it possibly can? And I bring that perspective to the table because I used to focus a lot on the character that I had to play.

The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by . . . swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.

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.

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.