Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.

A sentence well couched takes both the sense and understanding. I love not those cart-rope speeches that are longer than the memory of man can fathom.

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

Being articulate, my parents could make anything sound reasonable.

… a style of oratory that I never heard equaled in this or any other country

This fellow has a silver tongue

Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the highest personal energy.

Wise is the tongue, wet of perfect thought.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

The finest eloquence is that which gets things done.

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

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

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.

Gesturing with his body and head rather than with his arms, he grew very impassioned and seemed transfigured. Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.

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

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.

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

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.

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

Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way—(1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested

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

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

… sledgehammer eloquence...

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

Nor use too swelling, or ill-sounded words . . . .