Edward Herbert Quotes

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.

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

To speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do is style.

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

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

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.

No one can speak well, unless he thoroughly understands his subject.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

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

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

The aim of forensic oratory is to teach, to delight, to move.

It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it.

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

The simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.