Quotes and Sayings About Oratory
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The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth.
-- Aldous Huxley -
The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator.
-- Ben Jonson -
Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.
-- Brooks Hays -
Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must.
-- Claude C. Hopkins -
The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.
-- Corneliu Zelea Codreanu -
Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.
-- Elihu Burritt -
Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.
-- Emily Post -
There's a wideness in God's mercy Like the wideness of the sea Oratory Hymns.
-- Frederick William Faber -
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.
-- George Saintsbury -
As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.
-- Henry Purcell -
In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.
-- Jonathan Swift -
It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.
-- Jonathan Swift -
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero -
Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero -
To find ways of practicing democracy, not ways of orating about it, is our great problem.
-- Mary Barnett Gilson -
Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.
-- Mortimer Adler -
Whatever we conceive well we express clearly, and words flow with ease. [Fr., Ce que l'on concoit bien s'enonce clairement, Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisement.]
-- Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux -
When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'
-- Plutarch -
Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.
-- Rufus Choate -
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
-- Thomas B. Macaulay -
Oratory is just like prostitution: you must have little tricks.
-- Vittorio Emanuele Orlando -
The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.
-- Woodrow Wilson -
The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.
-- Isaac D'Israeli
