Why doesn’t the fellow who says, “I’m no speechmaker,” let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?  ~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, on speechmaking

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, on speechmaking

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, Journals, 1845

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

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

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