Oratory Skill 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.

Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature’s orators, using his rare powers solely and effectively to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well.

Modi is an excellent orator - sure, anybody who spouts untruths is an excellent orator.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed.

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

To address crowds and make promises does not require very much brains

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

It is much better when a member resumes his seat after he has made a speech for the House to have the feeling that they wish he had gone on longer instead of wondering why he did not stop sooner.

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

The practice of public speaking flourishes in every peaceful and free state.

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius.

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.

I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

I watched Muhammad Ali, how when he would speak, how it was such a thing of beauty. It sounded so wonderful. And I wanted to be like him.

Speaking of Sir Winston Churchill: He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.

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.

Obama's gift for delivering set-piece oratorical tours de force had special resonance to Americans fed up with a president who could hardly string two words together without a collision of syntax and whose idea of clever was the single entendre.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.