Montesquieu Quotes

Nobody wants to hear long speeches.

I [Moses] am not a man of words.

William Jennings Bryan is a much better orator than I am. I have to think.

Some directors have the gift of the gab, but I don't.

The ability to speak well is the shortcut to distinction.

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.

Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

In an easy matter. Anybody can be eloquent.

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

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

Some eloquence is like a magic.

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.

This trial has developed in the most remarkable manner, the insane love of speaking among public men. We are wading knee deep in words, words, words ….

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

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

Those who have few affairs to attend to are great speakers. The less men think, the more they talk.

The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiargift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease.

When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'

English is the perfect language for preachers because it allows you to talk until you think of what to say.

[On George H.W. Bush:] A man who wishes to lead the Western world should be able to find the right words, string them together in coherent sentences, and steer them to an intelligible conclusion. His sentences have the stuttering start of an old car on a cold morning. They never run smoothly. The only speech part that he has mastered completely is the non sequitur.

When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of Oratory, he answered, "Action," and which was the second, he replied, "action," and which was the third, he still answered "Action.