Charles Horton Cooley Quotes

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker.

In oratory the will must predominate.

A great speech is literature.

It is but a poor eloquence which only shows that the orator can talk.

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

Mr. Lincoln is one of Nature’s orators, using his rare powers solely and effectively to elucidate and to convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

I'm not very articulate. I don't have that skill.

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.

The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.

Talking and eloquence are not the same: to speak, and to speak well, are two things.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

Every idea is an incitement... eloquence may set fire to reason.

I'm an orator, a raconteur.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

I wish I could talk like Donald Trump or Steve Wynn. Hell, I'd love it.

If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently.

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

I often begin a thought with spirit and finish it with nonsense. The chain of my argument often escapes me, and when lost can seldom be retrieved. These faults are so overpowering that I should sink into perpetual silence were it not that sometimes in ardor of debate, when my feelings are wound up to a high tone, elocution pours itself along with unusual rapidity, and I have passages which would not shame a good speaker; this is the only thing that makes me tolerable to others or to myself.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.