Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Permit me also to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the cemetery. I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.

A good speech should be like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.

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

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.

I watched Muhammad Ali, how when he would speak, how it was such a thing of beauty. It sounded so wonderful. And I wanted to be like him.

An orator without judgment is a horse without a bridle.

Regan’s greatness as a rhetorician was in his delivery not in the content of what he said as with Churchill and Roosevelt.

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

Churchill would spend as many hours practicing as there were minutes in the speech.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

Nobody wants to hear long speeches.

Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

I've earned this microphone. No one gave this to me. I've earned this microphone. I use it each day to enter the arena of ideas, and do whatever I can to persuade you to agree with me.

Time is an illusion-to orators.

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.

Political leaders normally act by making convincing speeches.

To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.

The only people I know getting in high places by running their mouth are politicians.

The old notion that brevity is the essence of wit has succumbed to the modern idea that tedium is the essence of quality.