Orators Quotes

• Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.

  Sigmund Freud

  Teacher, Men, Decision

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• All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Oratory, Speech, Firsts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.340

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

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Moving, People, Feels

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• If it is naturally in you to be a good orator, a notable orator you will be when you have acquired knowledge and practice.

  Plato

  Practice, Notable, Ifs

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• A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Government, People, Democracy

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• The passions are the only orators which always persuade.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Passion, Emotional, Feelings

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

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Philosophical, Speech, Brevity Of Life

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• Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Philosophical, Vehement, Causes

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• What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Philosophical, Depth, Public Speaking

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• If you can't write your message in a sentence, you can't say it in an hour.

  Dianna Daniels Booher

  Change, Writing, Oratory

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• A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience.

  Leslie Stephen

  Talking, Talkers, Audience

  Leslie Stephen (2011). “Samuel Johnson”, p.60, Cambridge University Press

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• The simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Passion, Men, Oratory

  "The Moral Maxims and Reflections". Book by François de La Rochefoucauld. Maxim 8, 1678.

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• An orator is a good man who is skilled in speaking.

  Cato the Elder

  Men, Good Man

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• The passions are the only orators that always persuade: they are, as it were, a natural art, the rules of which are infallible; and the simplest man with passion is more persuasive than the most eloquent without it.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Art, Passion, Men

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 572-73, Maxims. No. 9, 1922.

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• However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones

  John Quincy Adams

  Love Is, Voice, Self

  John Quincy Adams (1810). “Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory: Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University”, p.102

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• There is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

  Plato

  Beautiful, Mean, Men

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• An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Success, Learning, Ideas

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• The orator is thereby an orator that keeps his feet ever on a fact.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Feet, Facts, Preaching

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1911). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.93, Рипол Классик

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• If you did wed my sister for her wealth,
  Then for her wealth's sake use her with more kindness;
  Or, if you like elsewhere, do it by stealth;
  Muffle your false love with some show of blindness;
  Let not my sister read it in your eye;
  Be not thy tongue thy own shame's orator;
  Look sweet, speak fair, become disloyalty;
  Apparel vice like virtue's harbinger;
  Bear a fair presence, though your heart be tainted;
  Teach sin the carriage of a holy saint;
  Be secret-false.

  William Shakespeare

  Sweet, Kindness, Eye

  William Shakespeare (1857). “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Dramatic and Poetic”, p.287

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• Orators inflame the people, whose anger is really but a short fit of madness.

  Jonathan Swift

  People, Madness, Fit

  Jonathan Swift, Deane Swift, Thomas Birch, Thomas Wilkes, Thomas Hawkesworth (1768). “The Works of the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Swift: Miscellanies in prose”, p.250

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• The spiritual kinship between Lincoln and Whitman was founded upon their Americanism, their essential Westernism. Whitman had grown up without much formal education; Lincoln had scarcely any education. One had become the notable poet of the day; one the orator of the Gettsyburg Address. It was inevitable that Whitman as a poet should turn with a feeling of kinship to Lincoln, and even without any association or contact feel that Lincoln was his.

  Edgar Lee Masters

  Spiritual, Feelings, Essentials

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• For converse among men, beautiful persons have less need of the mind's commending qualities. Beauty in itself is such a silent orator, that it is ever pleading for respect and liking, and by the eyes of others is ever sending, to their hearts for love.

  Owen Feltham

  Beauty, Beautiful, Eye

  Owen Feltham (1840). “Resolves: divine, moral and political”, p.89

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• I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Art, War, America

  Abraham Lincoln, James Baird McClure (2006). “Anecdotes and Stories of Abraham Lincoln”, p.118, Stackpole Books

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• There has never been a poet or orator who thought another better than himself.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Poet, Conceit

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• An orator without judgment is a horse without a bridle.

  Theophrastus

  Horse, Judgment

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