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“But there comes a point in the speech where I find my cadence. The crowd quiets rather than roars. It's the kind of moment I'd come to recognize in subsequent years, on certain magic nights. There's a physical feeling, a current of emotion that passes back and forth between you and the crowd, as if your lives and theirs are suddenly spliced together, like a movie reel, projecting backward and forward in time, and your voice creeps right up to the edge of cracking, because for an instant, you feel them deeply; you can see them whole. You've tapped into some collective spirit, a thing we all know and wish for - a sense of connection that overrides our differences and replaces them with a giant swell of possibility - and like all things that matter most, you know the moment is fleeting and that soon the spell will be broken.”
― Barack Obama, A Promised Land

“The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.”
― Joseph Goebbels

“The woman is the teacher of the youth, and therefore the builder of the foundation of the future. If the family is the nation’s source of strength, the woman is its core and centre.
The best place for the woman to serve her people is in her marriage, in the family, in motherhood.”
― Joseph Goebbels

“We focused our attention on the tall businessman. His rhetoric did not soar. Even his voice was gray; bleak like a dead possum in melting, muddy snow.”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“The most dangerous among us come dressed as eagles and we learn too late they are chickens in disguise. (Speech to seniors at Klein Forest High School)”
― Carlos Wallace, Life Is Not Complicated-You Are: Turning Your Biggest Disappointments into Your Greatest Blessings

“As Warren Beatty, perhaps the best student of the human condition in Hollywood, once told me, people will forget what you say, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Frank Luntz, Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear

“This was always the case when people asked if you knew what something meant. They didn’t want you to know it. They wanted to be able to explain it themselves, to prove themselves bearers of esoteric knowledge.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts

“When you speak from the heart, you are not giving a speech, you are communicating.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favors.”
― George Washington

“His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly as a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”
― William Gibbs McAdoo

“Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician—which was what the General had become—had to keep his lips constantly moving.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”
― FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

“I have discovered that the more the words, the greater the likelihood that nothing was said.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Too often ‘all of the noiseâ€� is a ruse designed to convince us that ‘all of the noiseâ€� is more than just ‘all of the noise.â€� However, everything gets terribly sticky when the people making ‘all of the noiseâ€� genuinely come to believe that ‘all of the noiseâ€� that they’re making is more than just ‘all of the noise.â€� For when that happens, you can’t even hear the noise because of all the noise.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I can weave thousands of words into moving syntax and powerful prose. But if I lay the pen down at the close of the final sentence, and if in doing so I myself have not acted on the words that I have woven, it would have been better had I said nothing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“A microphone and a podium gives you neither talent nor permission.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Engaging in lifelong learning to improve your public speaking skills is far from drudgery. It can lead to a better job, higher profits, more donations, and public policy objectives. That sounds like fun to me.”
― Ed Barks, The Truth About Public Speaking: The Three Keys to Great Presentations

“Life is not a theatrical monologue. Great speeches don't take anywhere if there is no action upon it. Don't confound being solidary with solitaire.”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job

“How to Jump: Once again we stand before our audience. The _Others_ wait for us to speak. Still we ask, how can we jump free? How can we speak. I say, turn inward. Feel the fear. Again, touch where it resides—yes, just above the solar plexus, that one glowing spot in painful spasm. Feel it. for there we can begin with something we know is _real_. And now can we jump?

Sometimes when I begin a speech, I look each member of the audience in the eyes. In a large group it sometimes takes a half minute or more. The silence grows uncomfortable. the people stare back. I hear the nervous coughs. But something has happened between us. Without words, I have shared with them the same feelings I suffer. I have felt fear, and then turn, have felt its discomfort in the pressing silence in the room.

Finally I begin, “Itâ€� is all right for us to feel uncomfortable as we launch our relationship. We do not know each other. We have no experience upon which to trust each other. Why shouldn’t we feel uncomfortable. I wondered as I looked at you what you expect of me. What do you think of me? And as I look at you, you too, must have wondered what I am thinking of you.â€� I have jumped. “We are going to have a valuable time together.â€� I have broken free.”
― Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day

“You would never be speechless, if you've read countless”
― Abdulwahid Razakhan

“Too long speeches are boring even if they're full of humour. Short speeches are very entertaining even if they lack humour. Be concise. Be simple. Make your speech short but very valuable.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Your actions speaks so loudly that you need not say anything else.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Jarret was inaugurated today.

We listened to his speech—short and rousing. Plenty of "America, America, God shed his grace on thee," and "God bless America," and "One nation, indivisible, under God," and patriotism, law, order, sacred honor, flags everywhere, Bibles everywhere, people waving one of each. His sermon—because that's what it was—was from Isaiah, Chapter One. "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers."

And then, "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they will be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land. But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Then, he spoke of peace, rebuilding and healing. "A strong Christian America," he said, "needs strong Christian American soldiers to reunite, rebuild, and defend it." In almost the same breath, he spoke of both "the generosity and the love that we must show to one another, to all of our fellow Christian Americans," and "the destruction we must visit upon traitors and sinners, those destroyers in our midst."

I'd call it a fire-and-brimstone speech, but what happens now?”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Don’t mistake noise for anything other than noise.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It's not about you, it's about the idea you're passionate about. Your job is to be there in service of that idea, to offer it as a gift.”
― Chris Anderson, TED Talks: The official TED guide to public speaking / Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World's Top Minds

“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others." - Winston Churchill”
― Winston Churchill

“The speeches that drum a drum; only noise a noise, not insight.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“For some reason, the former President failed to rise to the response of the audience to his unconscious humor. He began a phrase modestly,
"When I was in Washington," being a euphemism for
"When I was President" and the audience burst into laughter. Afterwards, he said sadly to Mrs. Coolidge:
"They seemed to be in a strange mood. I never spoke to an audience which laughed before.""
Yet a few weeks later when an enthusiastic woman Republican gurgled at him:
"Oh, Mr. Coolidge, I enjoyed your speech so much that I stood up during the whole speech. I couldn't get a seat."
Quipped Coolidge: "So did I!”
― William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon: The Story of Calvin Coolidge

“You are my Hound of Fate, the will made tangible, the wild fury and chaos held at bay, waiting to be unleashed. Passion to be honed into the brushstrokes of reality’s paint and blood upon the Grand Work.”
― Rain Harlow, Goddess Descension