Charles Bukowski Quotes

In those days it was very nice to have a President who clearly spoke the English language.

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.

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

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

There are people who have tremendously important things to say, but they say it so poorly that nobody would ever want to read it.

My gift seems to be that I am able to tell a story in a comprehensible and engaging way.

My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

The gifts of nature are necessary; but they are not sufficient to make a complete orator without art and study.

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

Unlike his father, Churchill was not a natural speaker.

I think, for me, one of the things I've been blessed with is the ability to speak with clarity.

If a man cannot make his point to keen boys in ten minutes, he ought to be shot!

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.

The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

I wasn't a great communicator, but I communicated great things.

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

The orator puts off his individuality, and is then most eloquent when most silent. He listens while he speaks, and is a hearer along with his audience.

You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech.

So mathematical truth prefers simple words since the language of truth is itself simple.

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.

How can I teach my boys the value and beauty of language and thus communication when the President himself reads westerns exclusively and cannot put together a simple English sentence? (John Steinbeck, in a private letter written during the Eisenhower administration)

Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.

Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced.