Mark McKinnon Quotes

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

He who frames the question wins the debate.

... They depended far more on their physical power of oratory than upon any semblance of argument ... with small regard for modesty, truth or time.

[On his debating style:] Attack is the re-action; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.

Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible. Further, in dealing with certain persons, even if we possessed the most accurate scientific knowledge, we should not find it easy to persuade them by the employment of such knowledge. For scientific discourse is concerned with instruction, but in the case of such persons instruction is impossible.

So you see how endlessly futile and fruitless it would be if we wanted to refute their objections every time they obstinately resolved not to think through what they say but merely to speak, just so long as they contradict our arguments in any way they can.

The gifts of nature are necessary; but they are not sufficient to make a complete orator without art and study.

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

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

Use your logick, and then your rhetorick. Rhetorick without logick, is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root; yet I confess more are taken with rhetorick than logick, because they are catched with a free expression, when they understand not reason. Logick must be natural, or it is worth nothing at all: Your rhetorick figures may be learned.

I could sway people with words—words that welled up within me.

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable …

Great speech is impassioned; small speech cantankerous.

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

As reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.

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.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid—in which case all comment is superfluous—or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

A good orator is pointed and impassioned.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

Political speeches are a particularly low form of rhetoric.

As a Shakespeare character, if you can persuade someone in a sentence or a speech, you've got it right.

I'm not good at throwing around rhetoric.

Regardless of how lyrical or rhetorically gifted they are in conveying big ideas, any candidate can do a good job of giving a speech if the goal of a speech is more than just delivering it well but achieving some end, whether it's convincing people of some issue or persuading them about you as a person.