Quotations about Speeches

Why doesn't the fellow who says, "I'm no speechmaker," let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration? ~Kin Hubbard


There are always three speeches, for every one you actually gave. The one you practiced, the one you gave, and the one you wish you gave. ~Dale Carnegie


Never be grandiloquent when you want to drive home a searching truth. Don't whip with a switch that has the leaves on, if you want it to tingle. ~Henry Ward Beecher


But I... never could make a good impromptu speech without several hours to prepare it. ~Mark Twain, 1879 speech (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Be sincere; be brief; be seated. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt, on speechmaking


When a sermon at length comes to an end, people rise and praise God, and they feel the same way after many other speeches. ~John Andrew Holmes


Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught. ~Sydney J. Harris


A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep! A speech reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart. ~Peggy Noonan


The nature of oratory is such that there has always been a tendency among politicians and clergymen to oversimplify complex matters. From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. ~Aldous Huxley


Always be shorter than anybody dared to hope. ~Lord Reading, on speechmaking


I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches. ~Adlai E. Stevenson


Oratory is the power to talk people out of their sober and natural opinions. ~Joseph Chatfield


The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1845


Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record. ~Archibald Philip Primrose


His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. ~Author Unknown


Political speeches are like steer horns. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between. ~Alfred E. Neuman


Public speaking is the art of diluting a two-minute idea with a two-hour vocabulary. ~Evan Esar


Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches. ~Will Rogers


His speeches to an hour-glass
Do some resemblance show
Because the longer time they run
The shallower they grow.
~Author Unknown


The problem with speeches isn't so much not knowing when to stop, as knowing when not to begin. ~Frances Rodman


Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum. ~John Kenneth Galbraith


Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either. ~Gore Vidal


Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated. ~G.B. Trudeau


The best way to sound like you know what you're talking about is to know what you're talking about. ~Author Unknown