I am sorry to say that sometimes matters of very small importance waste a good deal of precious time, by the long and repeated speeches and chicanery of gentlemen who will not wholly throw off the lawyer even in Congress.
William Whipple

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thomas Edison

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

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

I don’t attach importance to great speeches or philosophy.
Jacques Santer

Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don’t like giving speeches – I enjoy sitting on my rump.
Karen Morley

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

I don’t like jokes in speeches. I do like wit and humor. A joke is to humor what pornography is to erotic language in a good novel.
James Humes

If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn’t call it genius.
Michelangelo

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life giving speeches.
Colin Powell

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

I have said consistently both in my papers and in my speeches – which you heard in the primary campaign – that I will continue to phase out the Capital Stock and Franchise tax.
Ed Rendell

I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”
Mother Teresa

I know they are all environmentalists. I heard a lot of my speeches recycled.
Jesse Jackson

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.
Patricia Highsmith

If we did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.
Thomas Edison

I think my speeches are hilarious. I think I’m a natural comedian, but I like denying people the chance to laugh. I want to deny you the relief of the punchline.
Lydia Lunch

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Do not save your loving speeches for your friends till they are dead. Do not write them on their tombstones, speak them rather now instead.

All our dreams can come true – if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

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

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Dr. Seuss

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

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It is courage that counts.
Winston Churchill

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

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

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

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Always be shorter than anybody dared to hope.
Lord Reading, on speechmaking

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”
Goethe

I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.
Adlai E. Stevenson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

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

Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.
Eddie Rickenbacker

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Quit now, you’ll never make it. If you disregard this advice, you’ll be halfway there.
David Zucker

Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colourless photography of a printed record.
Archibald Philip Primrose

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein

His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.

A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.
Sivananda

Political speeches are like steer horns. A point here, a point there, and a lot of bull in between.
Alfred E. Neuman

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

Liberty don’t work as good in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers

Songs won�t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches. Songs are sneaky things; they can slip across borders.

Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It’s hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.
August Wilson

The problem with speeches isn’t so much not knowing when to stop, as knowing when not to begin.
Frances Rodman

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
Alan Bullock

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

During the presidential primaries of 1940, I received a request from the Democratic National Committee to sing God Bless America before the speeches.
Kate Smith

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

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other’s speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
H. L. Mencken

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

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.
Peter Drucker

The best way to sound like you know what you’re talking about is to know what you’re talking about.
For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
Francis Bacon