Oratory Speech Quotes & Sayings

Love breaks your heart, fucks you up - perfect, all-consuming chaos." ... He wraps me up in his arms, his eyes on mine. "But it's also this. Peace, and warmth, and so fucking beautiful, you'll risk anything to keep it. — Kristen Callihan

The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever. — Joss Whedon

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum. — John Kenneth Galbraith

He let Julius go. There was beginning to rise in him a feeling of profound disgust
a kind of hatred almost, of himself, of Julius, of everything. — Andre Gide

Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said] — Mark Logue

The tendency to superstitions should be counteracted from the earliest age; or rather steps should be taken to protect the mind of the child from superstitions imposed upon it by ignorant nurses or silly mothers. — Arthur Alfred Lynch

Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any
commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they
tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which
they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready
talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage,
sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body
politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire
the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do
wrong to the republic. — Theodore Roosevelt

I don't think I have the face - may have the voice but not the demeanor for an anchor. And I defied it. — Mike Wallace

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,
a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. — Henry David Thoreau

We must insist that free oratory is only the beginning of free speech; it is not the end, but a means to an end. The end is to find the truth. The practical justification of civil liberties is not that self-expression is one of the rights of man. It is that the examination of opinion is one of the
necessities of man. For experience tells us that it is only when freedom of opinion becomes the compulsion to debate that the seed which our fathers planted has produced its fruit. When that is
understood, freedom will be cherished not because it is a vent for our opinions but because it is the surest method of correcting them. — Walter Lippmann

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

Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is. — Gregory Maguire

The greatest words are written on hearts, not paper. — Matshona Dhliwayo

That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections. — Tom Rachman

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography. — Ambrose Bierce

That combination, perhaps, deterred me from telling Netanyahu the most difficult truth of all. Simply: that he had much in common with Obama. Both men were left-handed, both believed in the power of oratory and that they were the smartest men in the room. Both were loners, adverse to hasty decision making and susceptible to a strong woman's advice. And both saw themselves in transformative historical roles. Their similarities, perhaps as much as their differences, heightened the chances for friction between the president and Netanyahu, I could have told him. But I did not. Rather, as the prime minister descended the stairs to the tarmac that early May 20 morning, I merely said, "Welcome to Washington, sir," and extended my hand. This he gripped and pulled me toward him. With his eyes still flaring, he recalled the cable I sent him months back predicting the president's speech. "You called it right," he whispered. — Michael B. Oren

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory. — Mark Twain

A speech should not just be a sharing of information, but a sharing of yourself. — Ralph Archbold