Rhetorical Skill Quotes

I'm going to make a long speech because I've not had the time to prepare a short one.

An orator is a good man who is skilled in speaking.

… a style of oratory that I never heard equaled in this or any other country

Natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the scenes, saying the same thing over and over again and making it seem that theyare saying it for the first time.

Lincoln, steeped in the Bible and Shakespeare, set an impossibly high bar for presidential prose.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill-informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate, but speak he must; and if he is a man of talents, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully.

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius.

The mediocrity of his [Winston Churchill's] thinking is concealed by the majesty of his language.... He mistakes verbal facilities for mental inspiration.

[British Prime Minister William] Gladstone is a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination, that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents, and glorify himself.

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

He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.

There is no eloquence without a man behind it.

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.

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.

Ronald Reagan has a story for every occasion. Bill Clinton has an excuse for every occasion.

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

Words were another sword for the man who wielded them well.

He could talk a dog off a meat wagon. He talked a lot but said nothing.

Malcolm X found the language that communicated across the board, from college professor to floor sweeper, all at the same time, without demeaning the intellect of either.

Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.

There is no talent so pernicious as eloquence to those who have it under command.

I've always had the ability to manipulate words and communicate ideas and thoughts.