Archibald Philip Primrose Rosebery Quotes

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

To me, presentations are the most powerful device. You can't really name a movement that didn't start with the spoken word.

When you make speeches you elicit expectations against which you will be held accountable.

Gesturing with his body and head rather than with his arms, he grew very impassioned and seemed transfigured. Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which produced conviction in others because of the conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker himself.

All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written word but by the spoken word.

President Johnson wanted his speech writers to use words with fou r letters, sentences with four words, and paragraphs with four sentences

word thrower … phrase maker

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, 'Before they get up to speak they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down, they do not know what they have said.'

I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, and of any more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan

We either carry our audience with us, or irritate them.

Few orators have known how to achieve such admirable results by dint of repetition. Besides, Lenin always felt his audience. He never rose too high above its level, nor did he ever omit to descend to it at just the necessary moment, in order not to break the continuity of the hypnosis which dominated the will of his flock; and more than any one he realized that a mob is like a horse that wants to be firmly bestrode and spurred, that wants to feel the hand of a master.

An orator is a man who says what he thinks and feels what he says.

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.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

Thence to the famous orators repair, Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will that fierce democratie, Shook the arsenal, and fulmin'd over Greece, To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne.

A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.

The orator is the mouth (os) of a nation.

I never would've imagined in the first part of my life that I could've stood up and said anything. The war in Vietnam changed me. I was so angry. Some of my speeches probably weren't well considered.

Cicero said loud-bawling orators were driven by their weakness to noise, as lame men to take horse.

we have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches.

Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.

As soon as you move one step up from the bottom, your effectiveness depends on your ability to reach others through the spoken and written word.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.