Home > Work > On Speaking Well
1 " Hubert Humphrey’s wife is said to have advised him: “Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable. "
― Peggy Noonan , On Speaking Well
2 " Where you falter, alter. "
3 " What do you think of your job as? What service are you performing in society? What’s the point of what you do? "
4 " …On the wall of my room when I was in rehab was a picture of the space shuttle blasting off, autographed by every astronaut now at NASA. On top of the picture it says, “We found nothing is impossible.” That should be our motto. Not a Democratic motto, not a Republican motto, but an American motto. Because this is not something one party can do alone. It’s something we as a nation must do together. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible. Then they seem improbable. And then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.… "
5 " big things are best said, are almost always said, in small words. "
6 " it is harder to decide what you want to say than it is to figure out how to say it. "
7 " a speech about everything is a speech about nothing. "
8 " you can’t say everything, the fact that you have to winnow your thoughts down to the essentials, means that you can get to the heart of the matter quickly. "
9 " You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause. "
10 " It is usually and paradoxically true that the more important the message, the less time required to say it. "
11 " (Oddly enough, the more tired you get as you write and rewrite, the more likely you are to abandon any self-conscious semi-stentorian writing and write more like yourself. Fatigue lets you emerge. This is good.) "
12 " NO SPEECH SHOULD LAST MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES "
13 " We singe but never burn. "
14 " Style is not a replacement for substance, and cannot camouflage a lack of substance. "
15 " Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em—tell ’em—then tell ’em what you told ’em. "
16 " Every speech has a job to do, and no matter who you are, pope, president, poet or pipe layer, if you’re giving a speech you have to understand what its job is and work to make sure it’s done. "
17 " People don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care. "
18 " Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor." -- James Carville "
19 " I think that to achieve true adulthood is to understand the simplicity of things. "
20 " When you are thinking about what you want to say, it is often helpful to define it down, in your own mind, to a sentence or two. "
