Top 87 Oratory Quotes & Sayings

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long.

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall.

There is nothing like oratory, it is a skill that can turn a commoner into a king.

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by . . . swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day.

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory.

Ideal conversation must be an exchange of thought, and not, as many of those who worry most about their shortcomings believe, an eloquent exhibition of wit or oratory.

Oratory is just like prostitution: you must have little tricks.

Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business.

The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look.

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable, nothing so rough and uncultured as not to gain brilliance and refinement from eloquence.

I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.

The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.

When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.'

A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory.

My parents aren't artists or anything, but growing up in Wales, especially in a Welsh language school and community, they have this thing called the Eisteddfod where people compete in singing and acting and dancing and oratory all sorts of things. From a very young age, it's been a part of my upbringing.

Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory.

There's a wideness in God's mercy Like the wideness of the sea Oratory Hymns.

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms.

The aim of forensic oratory is to teach, to delight, to move.

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

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

In oratory the will must predominate.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

Oratory is the art of making a loud noise sound like a deep thought.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

There is an atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it!

I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of women in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.

In oratory affectation must be avoided; it being better for a man by a native and clear eloquence to express himself than by those words which may smell either of the lamp or inkhorn.

Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light.

The ancients, who in these matters were not perhaps such blockheads as some may conceive, considered poetical quotation as one of the requisite ornaments of oratory.

My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I'd come to take for granted.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

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.

Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must.

Why do you rant and brag with such a spate of words, as if you wanted to overwhelm me with a sort of tempest and deluge of oratory-which nevertheless falls with the greater force on your own head, while my ark rides aloft in safety?

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.

None but those who have loved can be supposed to understand the oratory of the eye, the mute eloquence of a look, or the conversational powers of the face. Love's sweetest meanings are unspoken; the full heart knows no rhetoric of words, and resorts to the pantomime of sighs and glances.

An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever.

Let us never forget that, to be profited, that is, to be spiritually improved in knowledge, faith, holiness, joy and love, is the end of hearing sermons, and not merely to have our taste gratified by genius, eloquence and oratory.

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you.

He has oratory who ravishes his hearers while he forgets himself.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

In oratory the greatest art is to hide art.

Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students.

It is the first rule in oratory that a man must appear such as he would persuade others to be: and that can be accomplished only by the force of his life.

Hitler's oratory moved people and appealed to their hopes and dreams. But his speeches malevolently twisted hope into some gnarled ghastly entities, and appealed to the latent, darkest prejudices of Germans.

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !!

Although there are some enormously gifted lecturers and preachers who do create community with oratory, I like to do anything I can to engage my students with each other, with me, and with the subject. And the subject, I think, always has to take prominence.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.