Laura Schlessinger Quotes

Look, I debate for a living so I don't need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker.

William Jennings Bryan is a much better orator than I am. I have to think.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Making clever speeches takes a lot of work and a lot of time.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

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

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

It really is true that an orator is simply a good man who speaks well.

I wasn't a great debater.

People have said I can come off a little trial-lawyerish. I tell people I never actually became a lawyer, but I play one at City Hall.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

I wish I could talk like Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. Hell, I'd love it.

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.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan

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.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every word.