Jack Kemp Quotes

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

Look, I debate for a living so I don't need to learn any lessons from amateurs.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

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

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.

I [Moses] am not a man of words.

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

I was on the debate team.

At the Oxford Union I'd never debated before but I gave it a go.

A debate is a very specific kind of performance.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

No matter what stage of life you are graduating from or entering, learning how to build and state your case is something every person in the world should know how to do.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

In oratory the will must predominate.

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

I'm a better polemicist in prose.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

I made lots of talks and challenged lots of people.

Talking and eloquence are not the same.

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

A candidate for office can have no greater advantage than muddled syntax; no greater liability than a command of language.

William Jennings Bryan is a much better orator than I am. I have to think.

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

It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech.