William Bernbach Quotes

To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable, we must be truthful.

In oratory the will must predominate.

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.

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

I wish I could talk like Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. Hell, I'd love it.

Some eloquence is like a magic.

The aim of the sculptor is to convince us that he is a sculptor; the aim of the orator, is to convince us that he is not an orator.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust, not in the right argument, but in the right word.

To be successful you have to convince the public.

What you say in defense of … ideas matters, and what people hear matters even more.

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

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

In order to make a good speech you must have something to say and you have to believe it.

I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

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.

A great speech is literature.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

To me, presentations are the most powerful device. You can't really name a movement that didn't start with the spoken word.

A story never looks as good as when the other fellow buys it.

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.

Learn the art of the pitch and of messaging.

You have to be able to enthral and persuade at the same time.

I look at myself more as a storyteller than a screenwriter, as pretentious as that may sound, but that's what really attracts me to TED Talks. For me, the really effective ones are being presented by expert storytellers.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.