Howard Jacobson Quotes

If you can talk, you can write.

People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.

President Johnson wanted his speech writers to use words with fou r letters, sentences with four words, and paragraphs with four sentences

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.

I don't like giving speeches - I enjoy sitting on my rump.

I am not eloquent.

I love English. I learned it from the speeches of Winston Churchill.

In high school I was president of the Student Council, and I ended up doing a lot of speeches. After you do a few in front of different schools, you get really comfortable talking in front of an audience.

He is a third rate Western lawyer…they take a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar and whose speeches are illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

A man may speak very well in the House of Commons, and fail completely in the House of Lords.

I [Moses] am not a man of words.

I regard most of my speeches as opportunities to teach rather than traditional political speeches.

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 ….

A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.

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

Eloquence being, therefore, considered so essential, must always be a great standard of personal merit, a certain road to popular favor, and an universal passport to public honors.

Choose each word as a precision tool. Consider how it sounds, not how it reads.

We need to become more acutely conscious that words matter. None of us would deny that ideas and opinions matter, but we can sometimes be careless about how we express them. The words we choose to advance an idea, opinion, or point of view have a huge impact on how people react and respond to that view. When we use hyperbole, we increase the chances of being misunderstood and of promoting equally exaggerated counter-reactions, especially when people are reacting almost instantaneously.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

I'm not good with words, and I get mixed up.

Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.

Political speeches might represent the ideas of the politician at hand, but often times, it's not written in their own words.

Take some elocution lessons; you can joke with Ebonics, but the truth is, nothing beats the King's English. Learning how to speak properly, and the art of delivery can take you very far in life!

I think Donald Trump's language and the way that he presents things oftentimes is not good.