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Oratory is the highest form of music -- Agona Apell
Oratory is just like prostitution: you must have little tricks. -- Vittorio Emanuele Orlando
When Demosthenes was asked what was the first part of Oratory, he answered, "Action," and which was the second, he replied, "action," and which was the third, he still answered "Action. -- Plutarch
In oratory the will must predominate. -- David Hare
Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. -- George Saintsbury
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Oratory is the art of making a loud noise sound like a deep thought. -- Bennett Cerf
There's a wideness in God's mercy Like the wideness of the sea Oratory Hymns. -- Frederick William Faber
Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place. -- Samuel Johnson
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. -- Emily Post
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. -- Isocrates
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. -- Charles Horton Cooley
Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes. -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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. -- David Josiah Brewer
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. -- John Vinocur
Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. -- Thomas Jefferson
The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. -- Ben Jonson
There is no true orator who is not a hero. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
It makes a great difference whether Davus or a hero speaks. -- Horace
Next to fried foods, the South has suffered most from oratory. -- Brooks Hays
With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Its Constitution--the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence. -- Rufus Choate
Poesy and oratory omit things not essential, and insert little beautiful digressions, in order to place everything in the most effective light. -- Isaac Watts
Very good orators, when they are out, they will spit; and for lovers, lacking--God warn us!--matter, the cleanliest shift is to kiss. -- William Shakespeare
Hark to that shrill, sudden shout, The cry of an applauding multitude, Swayed by some loud-voiced orator who wields The living mass as if he were its soul! -- William C. Bryant
Every man should study conciseness in speaking; it is a sign of ignorance not to know that long speeches, though they may please the speaker, are the torture of the hearer. -- Owen Feltham
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. -- Jonathan Swift
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. -- Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury
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
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
There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea. -- Stephen Fry
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. -- Seamus Heaney
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
I don't have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had. -- Noam Chomsky
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. -- Noam Chomsky
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! -- David Josiah Brewer
History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. -- James Howard Kunstler
In oratory the greatest art is to hide art. -- Jonathan Swift
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. -- Oscar Wilde
He has oratory who ravishes his hearers while he forgets himself. -- Johann Kaspar Lavater
The aim of forensic oratory is to teach, to delight, to move. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !! -- Winston Churchill
There is nothing like oratory, it is a skill that can turn a commoner into a king. -- Winston Churchill
ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography. -- Ambrose Bierce
There is an atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it! -- Albert Einstein
Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'... -- George Chapman
When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.' -- Plutarch
I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts. -- Sinclair Lewis
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. -- Sinclair Lewis
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. -- Aldous Huxley
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. -- Woodrow Wilson
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. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
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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. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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. -- Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
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. -- Mortimer Adler
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. -- Margot Asquith
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. -- Henry Purcell
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. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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. -- Claude C. Hopkins
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. -- Thomas Jefferson
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. -- Richard M Perloff
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. -- Henry Clay
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 -- Mark Twain
Inspiring leadership communication is not about great oratory or great charisma; rather it is about getting others to believe in themselves and believe in your cause, and then achieve more than they thought was possible. -- Kevin Murray

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