Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

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.

To pull off successful attacks in debates, you have to execute with nuance and subtlety. It has to be artful.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

It is true the orator may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen to him. But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.

I wasn't a great debater.

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

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Nature has ordained that the man who is pleading his own cause before a large audience, will be more readily listened to than he who has no object in view other than the public benefit.

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

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

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you've got it right.

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.

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

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.

Eloquence, when at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection; but addressing itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding. Happily, this pitch it seldom attains. But what a Tully or a Demosthenes could scarcely effect over a Roman or Athenian audience, every Capuchin, every itinerant or stationary teacher can perform over the generality of mankind, and in a higher degree, by touching such gross and vulgar passions.

Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

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