In oratory the will must predominate. [ Hare ]

Brevity is a great praise of eloquence. [ Cicero ]

The orator is the mouth (os) of a nation. [ Joseph Roux ]

There is no true orator who is not a hero. [ Emerson ]

Bright-eyed fancy, hovering over.
Scatters from her pictured urn.
Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. [ Gray ]

He lards with flourishes his long harangue. [ Dryden ]

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 Cullen Bryant ]

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. [ Ben Jonson ]

Eloquence is in the assembly, not in the speaker. [ William Pitt ]

While words of learned length, and thundering sound,
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head should carry all he knew. [ Goldsmith ]

What the orators want in depth, they give you in length. [ Montesquieu ]

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion. [ Macaulay ]

The manner of your speaking is full as important as the matter. [ Chesterfield ]

It is remarkable that they talk most who have the least to say. [ Prior ]

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

Oratory is the power to talk people out of their sober and natural opinions. [ Chatfield ]

Pour the full tide of eloquence along, serenely pure, and yet divinely strong. [ Pope ]

His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when he arrives at his peroration it is in full blaze. [ Burke ]

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

The capital of the orator is in the bank of the highest sentimentalities and the purest enthusiasms. [ Edward G. Parker ]

Orators are most vehement when they have the weakest cause, as men get on horseback when they cannot walk. [ Cicero ]

He is an eloquent man who can treat humble subjects with delicacy, lofty things impressively, and moderate things temperately. [ Cicero ]

Eloquence is the painting of thought; and thus, those who, after having painted it, still add to it, make a picture instead of a portrait. [ Pascal ]

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

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. [ Swift ]

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. [ Feltham ]

Oratory may be symbolized by a warrior's eye, flashing from under a philosopher's brow. But why a warrior's eye rather than a poet's? Because in oratory the will must predominate. [ J. C. and A. W. Hare ]

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. [ Lord Herbert ]

He was given to flights of oratory that way - a very dangerous thing, for often the wings which take one into clouds of oratorical enthusiasm are wax and melt up there, and down you come. [ Mark Twain, Educations and Citizenship ]

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. [ La Rochefoucauld ]

There is no power like that of oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears; Cicero, by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. [ Henry Clay ]

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 ]

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning. [ Burritt ]

Oratory is the huffing and blustering spoiled child of a semi-barbarous age. The press is the foe of rhetoric, but the friend of reason; and the art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and readers wise enough to read. [ Colton ]

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. [ Bovee ]

If our eloquence be directed above the heads of our hearers, we shall do no execution. By pointing our arguments low, we stand a chance of hitting their hearts as well as their heads. In addressing angels, we could hardly raise our eloquence too high; but we must remember that men are not angels. [ Colton ]

Neither can we admit that definition of genius that some would propose - a power to accomplish all that we undertake; for we might multiply examples to prove that this definition of genius contains more than the thing defined. Cicero failed in poetry. Pope in painting. Addison in oratory; yet it would be harsh to deny genius to these men. [ Colton ]

The language of the heart - the language which comes from the heart and goes to the heart - is always simple, always graceful, and always full of power, but no art of rhetoric can teach it. It is at once the easiest and most difficult language - difficult, since it needs a heart to speak it; easy, because its periods though rounded and full of harmony, are still unstudied. [ Bovee ]