Frank Luntz Quotes

[M]ere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.

Questions are often more effective than statements in moving others. Or to put it more appropriately, since the research shows that when the facts are on your side, questions are more persuasive than statements, don't you think you should be pitching more with questions?

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

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail very completely in the House of Lords. There are two distinct styles requisite: I intend, in the course of my career, if I have time, to give a specimen of both.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Eloquence is vehement simplicity.

Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of others are never captured.

Rhetoric is the counterpart of logic; since both are conversant with subjects of such a nature as it is the business of all to have a certain knowledge of, and which belong to no distinct science. Wherefore all men in some way participate of both; since all, to a certain extent, attempt, as well to sift, as to maintain an argument; as well to defend themselves, as to impeach.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.

If a claim is worth making, make it in the most impressive way.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well is the chief instrument of cultural change.

The best way to get a better answer is to start asking a better question.

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.

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

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

Most great leaders are also great communicators. Great leaders have learned how to persuade so their objectives can be reached. The most powerful device to persuade is story. Stating facts and figures is not memorable. Emotionally connecting your audience to your idea through story will move them.

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

With all women gentleness is the most persuasive and powerful argument.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.