Rhetorical Ability Quotes

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius.

Obama isn't good off the cuff, especially when challenged; he is far better with a prepared speech.

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.

Polk...is just qualified for an eminent County Court lawyer....He has no wit, no literature, no point of argument, no gracefulness of delivery, no eloquence of language, no philosophy, no pathos, no felicitous impromptus; nothing that can constitute an orator, but confidence, fluency, and labor.

Depend upon it, sir, it is when you come close to a man in conservation that you discover what his real abilities are; to make a speech in a public assembly is a knack.

What the people call eloquence is the facility some persons have of speaking alone and for a long time, aided by extravagant gestures, a loud voice, and powerful lungs.

... the gustiest and gloriest, loudest and lustiest, the deadliest and damndest orator ever heard on this or any other earth ..., the champion boob-bumper of all epoches.

[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.

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

Unlike his father, Churchill was not a natural speaker.

It was an argument of rare power and eloquence.

Words impress me. If a man can speak eloquently and beautifully to me, I just melt on the floor.

I am the first to admit that I am no great orator or no person that got where I have gotten by any William Jennings Bryan technique.

If my tongue were trained to measures, I would sing a stirring song.

Kennedy had a much better speech writer than I do.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

My father's wit, and my mother's tongue, assist me!

And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!

He is the most brilliant speaker of the English tongue of all men on this globe

My father would have been impressed by Barack Obama's mind and style and grace of manner, as well as by - I'm certain - his abilities as a writer.

Men and words are ready made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

Im a soulless lawyer. Give me any opinion and I can argue it.

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.