Oliver Goldsmith Quotes

There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.

Eloquence wins its great and enduring fame quite as much from the benches of our opponents as from those of our friends.

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.

Eloquence, to produce her full effect, should start from the head of the orator, as Pallas from the brain of Jove, completely armed and equipped. Diffidence, therefore, which is so able a mentor to the writer, would prove a dangerous counsellor for the orator.

I am the first to admit that I am no great orator or no person that got where I have gotten by any William Jennings Bryan technique.

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

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

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

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

Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature’s orators, using his rare powers solely and effectively to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well.

There happened in my time one noble speaker [Sir Francis Bacon] who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end.

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

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

Eloquence and wisdom are by no means the same thing. They are sometimes united, but not necessarily ; perhaps never when eloquence is the mere gift of nature rather than the slow result of nature and art conjoined. A ready supply of glittering language and an ardent conception, i. e. a fertile imagination, and quick feelings, united to a retentive memory—these are together quite sufficient to make an orator, but by no means to make a wise man; to make a speaker or even a leader in a popular assembly, but not necessarily a statesman.

He is the most brilliant speaker of the English tongue of all men on this globe

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

Eloquence being, therefore, considered so essential, must always be a great standard of personal merit, a certain road to popular favor, and an universal passport to public honors.

If all our agents would abridge their speeches one half, I am satisfied the effect produced would be much greater. The 'art of leaving off' at the right time, and in the right place, is one of the most difficult things to learn.