A Quote by Dale Carnegie

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

Dale Carnegie

Quote Topics

Asking Attention Audience Either Entertainment Excuse His Must Only Speaker Them Truth

Quote Author

Dale Carnegie
American - Writer
November 24, 1888 - November 1, 1955

At 25, I was in the audience of my first professional speaker, Bob Bales. His presentation got my attention. I had never seen anyone having so much fun 'at work' and getting paid for it!

Zig Ziglar

When I saw the sun bears at the Oakland Zoo, I immediately was drawn to them. Not to be ornery, but regarding what you said about the speaker identifying with the bear: I'm not sure it's exactly right to say that the speaker feels that the bear must share his sadness, or whatever else he is feeling. That would be classic pathetic fallacy, which is certainly generative for poetry, but here the speaker appears actually to be rejecting that idea.

Matthew Zapruder

When he [the slothful person] is pressed to be diligent, either in his worldly affairs or in the business of religion, this is his excuse (and a sorry excuse it is as bad as none).

Matthew Henry

One's concentration as a performer must remain centered on the action of which one is a part. For it is in truth only one's own concentration on the imagined reality of the role that can force the audience's attention to that same place.

Rick Dees

You have to understand that you are not making the film for yourself; you're making it for the audience. If I am asking my audiences to buy tickets, I owe them the worth of their money, and I owe them entertainment.

Abhishek Bachchan

Truth is dangerous. It topples palaces and kills kings. It stirs gentle men to rage and bids them take up arms. It wakes old grievances and opens forgotten wounds. It is the mother of the sleepless night and the hag-ridden day. And yet there is one thing that is more dangerous than Truth. Those who would silence Truth’s voice are more destructive by far. It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth. Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced. But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known. Even if you dare not speak truth to others, never lie to yourself.

Frances Hardinge

Look at me as an example. I don't have the best education or the best looks. Where I'm from in Nigeria is not entertainment driven, it's the northern part of Nigeria and over there they hardly pay attention to entertainment. I came out of that place to attain this level of success. I always say if I can get here with all of these imperfections then no one has the excuse to fail in life.

Ice Prince

I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. To try to think of what makes for entertainment is a very Japanese thing. The people who think like this are old-fashioned. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist

Takashi Miike

It becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with his own intentions, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own

Mikhail Bakhtin

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.

David E. Kelley

If the speaker won't boil it down, the audience must sweat it out.

Raymond Duncan

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all.

Marge Piercy

All truth is given by revelation, either general or special, and it must be received by reason. Reason is the God-given means for discovering the truth that God discloses, whether in his world or his Word. While God wants to reach the heart with truth, he does not bypass the mind.

Jonathan Edwards

Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. Asking me about violence is like going up to Vincente Minnelli and asking him to justify his musical sequences.