Julius Charles Hare Quotes

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

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

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

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.

A great speech is literature.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

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

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.

Some eloquence is like a magic.

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

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

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

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

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.

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

The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him.

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

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

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

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

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

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

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.