To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers or both.
~ Elizabeth Charles
Whatever is well said by another is mine.
~ Seneca
Winston [Churchill] has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.
~ F. E. Smith
Would you persuade speak of interest not of reason.
~ Benjamin Franklin
It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.
~ Sophocles
All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.
~ George Bernard Shaw
A dull speaker like a plain woman is credited with all the virtues for we charitably suppose that a surface so unattractive must be compensated by interior blessings.
~ A. P. Herbert
Once you get people laughing they're listening and you can tell them almost anything.
~ Herbert Gardner
Speak what you think today in words as hard as cannon balls and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again though it contradict everything you said today.
When a man gets talking about himself he seldom fails to be eloquent and often reaches the sublime.
~ Josh Billings
In an easy cause any man may be eloquent.
~ Ovid
The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion.
~ Thomas Babington Macaulay
If no thought your mind does visit make your speech not too explicit.
~ Piet Hein
Oratory: the art of making deep noises from the chest sound like important messages from the brain.
~ H. I. Phillips
The glittering generalities of the speaker have left an impression more delightful than permanent.
~ Franklin J. Dickman
Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.
~ Winston Churchill
First learn the meaning of what you say and then speak.
~ Epictetus
When a man is asked to make a speech the first thing he has to decide is what to say.
~ Gerald Ford
I've never thought my speeches were too long I've rather enjoyed them.
~ Hubert Humphrey
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
~ George Eliot
Look wise say nothing and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.
~ William Osier
I have learnt a good deal from my own talk.
~ Thomas Chandler Haliburton
Speech is the small change of silence.
~ George Meredith
If you don't say anything you won't be called on to repeat it.
~ Calvin Coolidge
In Maine we have a saying that there's no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.
~ Edmund Muskie
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
~ William Shakespeare
I always had dreams as a kid. I definitely sat at home and watched the Oscars every year and got emotional every year at everyone's speeches.
~ Yvonne Strahovski
I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.
~ Pierre Trudeau
As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeches, whether they be wise or foolish.
~ Demosthenes