Effective Speech Quotes

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Much wisdom often goes with fewest words.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.

People pay attention to what a President says, whether or not he pauses for emphasis in the right places. Sometimes they even read the text.

Like a beautiful flower that is colorful but has no fragrance, even well spoken words bear no fruit in one who does not put them into practice.

He also knows the power of word.

Beautiful eyes in the face of a handsome woman are like eloquence to speech.

A mediocre speech supported by all the power of delivery will be more impressive than the best speech unaccompanied by such power.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

What is required is not a lot words, but effectual ones.

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs: for occasions have their revolutions, and what has once been advantageously used may be so again, either as an old thing or a new one.

Being a comfortable public speaker, which involves easily being able to go off-script, strongly signals competence.

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

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.

Speech is the best show a man puts on.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

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

As veterans we should be smarter about how we talk about things.

A thing said walks in immortality if it has been said well.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

I think it is important to begin with a statement in your speech that grabs the attention of the audience. I try to make my opening line 15 words or less.

It's not what you say, but how you say it!