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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 |
| It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. ~ Mark Twain |
| Be sincere; be brief; be seated. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt |
| 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 |
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| 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, |
| 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 |
| 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 |