Speech Writers, Speechwriting Quotes

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

I am much obliged to you gentlemen for leaving me one sentence of my own.

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.

Writers and politicians don't think the same. They define truth differently.

I did the commencement speech at UNH in 2006, and one of the biggest jokes was a 'Guts' joke.

When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of Oratory, he answered, "Action," and which was the second, he replied, "action," and which was the third, he still answered "Action.

Churchill has spent the best years of his life preparing impromptu remarks.

No, and in fact I get a bit frustrated, because I'm actually quite good at one-liners, and I've had hundreds of them over the years, and they sink without trace, and I get very frustrated. Every party conference I really work on the speeches, and I always have two or three things I'm quite proud of, and no one ever remembers them.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

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.

Speechwriting is where the philosophical, ideological and political tensions of the administration get worked out.

Anybody who makes speeches written by someone else is just a robot.

If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on learning to write and to speak before an audience . Nothing is more important than the abillity to communicate effectively.

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.

The very best impromptu speeches are the ones written well in advance.

If you are a speechwriter, you have to know what the person you're writing for thinks. A lot of foreign policy advisers are thinking, 'How can I get my proposal into this guy's speech?' I was just thinking, 'What does he want to say?'

I could have continued being a speechwriter for as long as I wanted.

Less is almost always better than more. Short words, short sentences, short speeches.

A great many political speeches are literary parricides; they kill their fathers.

This is bullshit. I'm not doing this.

I don't like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.

I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words.

[Spiro] Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency. He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the '60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew's tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

With reference to political speeches in political campaigns or with reference to discussions in the Senate, I do no more than make a skeleton outline of the line of argument I wish to pursue. I do not undertake to reduce the speech to manuscript form. Many of my speeches which have been most satisfactory to me I have prepared in a few hours. I think it is quite accurate to say that the manuscript is practically unknown in my speaking. Furthermore, I should say that even the skeleton outline referred to above is generally forgotten after I begin my speech. I try to get the subject and the outline of the subject and the objective thoroughly in my mind, and all the preparations are with a view of doing this rather than with the idea of having something before me to follow.