Oratory Quotes

The poet is the nearest borderer upon the orator. ~ Ben Jonson

For Alwyn's grandfather, who was known as "the greatest talker in the country," used words which no one else understood, words which he did not understand, and words which do not exist, to swell a passionate theme, to confound his neighbors in an argument, and for their own sake. He would say, for example, "My farm was the very apocalypse of fertility, but the renter has rested on his oars till it is good for nothing," or "Manifest the bounty to pass the salt shaker in my direction." Something of the Bible, something of an Irish inheritance, something of a liar's anxiety, made of his most ordinary remark a strange and wearisome oratory. ~ Glenway Wescott

When Demosthenes was asked what were the three most important aspects of oratory, he answered, 'Action, Action, Action.' ~ Plutarch

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry. ~ Henry Purcell

These are the three things - volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm - that a speaker bears in mind. It is those who do bear them in mind who usually win prizes in the dramatic contests; and just as in drama the actors now count for more than the poets, so it is in the contests of public life, owing to the defects of our political institutions. ~ Aristotle.

Let us never forget that, to be profited, that is, to be spiritually improved in knowledge, faith, holiness, joy and love, is the end of hearing sermons, and not merely to have our taste gratified by genius, eloquence and oratory. ~ John Angell James

[Stump speeches] are to oratory what a stump is to a tree. ~ Jon Stewart

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

Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You're a freak. But I really can't accept these-'
Were you raised in a barn? Don't be ruuuuuude, my boy. They're a gift.'
Blay shook his head. 'Take them, John. You're just going to lose this argument, and it will save us from the theatrics.'
Theatrics?' Qhuinn leaped up and assumed a Roman oratory pose. 'Whither thou knowest thy ass from thy elbow, young scribe?'
Blay blushed. 'Come on-'
Qhuinn threw himself at Blay, grasping onto the guy's shoulders and hanging his full weight off him. 'Hold me. Your insult has left me breathless. I'm agasp.'
Blay grunted and scrambled to keep Qhuinn up off the floor. 'That's agape.'
Agasp sounds better.'
Blay was trying not to smile, trying not to be delighted, but his eyes were sparkling like sapphires and his cheeks were getting red. With a silent laugh, John sat on one of the locker room benches, shook out his pair of white socks, and pulled them on under his new old jeans. 'You sure, Qhuinn? 'Cause I have a feeling they're going to fit and you might change your mind.
Qhuinn abruptly lifted himself off Blay and straightened his clothes with a sharp tug. 'And now you offend my honor.' Facing off at John, he flipped into a fencing stance.
Touché.'
Blay laughed. 'That's en garde, you damn fool.'
Qhuinn shot a look over his shoulder. 'ça va, Brutus?'
Et tu?'
That would be tutu, I believe, and you can keep the cross-dressing to yourself, ya perv.'
Qhuinn flashed a b ~ J.R. Ward

Earlier on I said something so lucidly philosophical that my oratory rambled non-stop right into expressing amazement I had just said that. ~ Beth Myrle Rice

We must insist that free oratory is only the beginning of free speech; it is not the end, but a means to an end. The end is to find the truth. The practical justification of civil liberties is not that self-expression is one of the rights of man. It is that the examination of opinion is one of the
necessities of man. For experience tells us that it is only when freedom of opinion becomes the compulsion to debate that the seed which our fathers planted has produced its fruit. When that is
understood, freedom will be cherished not because it is a vent for our opinions but because it is the surest method of correcting them. ~ Walter Lippmann

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of forms. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The art of reasoning becomes of first importance. In this line antiquity has left us the finest models for imitation; I should consider the speeches of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus, as pre-eminent specimens of logic, taste, and that sententious brevity which, using not a word to spare, leaves not a moment for inattention to the hearer. Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. ~ Thomas Jefferson

If you can't write your message in a sentence, you can't say it in an hour. ~ Dianna Daniels Booher

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

When was the last time you heard an insightful, inspiring piece of oratory from an Australian political leader, an appeal to what is pure and true within humanity: a statement of belief backed by ideas for change betterment, a call to those immutable values wherein lie the potential greatness of people individually and collectively? Such exhortation, such leadership is lamentably scarce. ~ Michael Short

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. ~ Elihu Burritt

Why did you come here tonight?" she asked. "Other than the fact that you've finally come to your senses and realize you love me."
Chuckling, Grey reached up and untied the ribbons that held her mask. The pretty silk fell away to reveal the beautiful face beneath. "I missed you," he replied honestly. "And you were right-about everything. I'm tired of drifting through life. I want to live again-with you."
A lone tear trickled down her cheek. "I think that might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."
He grinned. "I have more."
She pressed her fingers to his lips. "I'm tired of talking." She kissed him, teasing his lips with the ripe curves of hers, sliding her tongue inside to rub against his in a sensual rhythm that had him fisting his hands in her skirts.
By the time they reached Mayfair, Grey's hair was mussed, Rose's skirts crushed, and he was harder than an oratory competition for mutes.
"I can't believe you came," she told him as the entered the house, arms wrapped around each other. "I'm so proud of you."
"I wouldn't have done it without you."
She shook her head. "You did it for yourself not for me."
Perhaps that was true, and perhaps it wasn't. He had no interest in discussing it tonight. "It's just the beginning," he promised. "I'm going to go wherever you want to go from now on. Within reason."
She laughed. "Of course. We can't have you attending a musicale just to please me, can we?" She gazed up at him. " ~ Kathryn Smith

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. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

With little art, clear wit and sense Suggest their own delivery. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Literary qualifications have no more to do with it than oratory has with salesmanship. One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly, and convincingly, just as a salesman must. ~ Claude C. Hopkins

Women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

ORATORY, n. A conspiracy between speech and action to cheat the understanding. A tyranny tempered by stenography. ~ Ambrose Bierce

The sense of war, the extraordinary bravery of the Allied armies, the numbers, the losses, the real suffering that disappears in time and commemorative oratory, are not marked out in any red guidebook of the emotions, but they are present if you look. ~ John Vinocur

He not only fumbled badly in his attempts at impromptu oratory en route to the capital, but worst of all, ended his journey in the dead of night, embarrassingly fearful for his safety, after encouraging unseemly partisan demonstrations in friendly Northern cities. He was too conspicuous. He was too sequestered. He was too careless. He was too calculating. He was too conciliatory. He was too coercive. He was too sloppy. ~ Harold Holzer

Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening. ~ Dorothy Sarnoff

He has oratory who ravishes his hearers while he forgets himself. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

Oratory should raise your heart rate. Oratory should blow the doors off the place. ~ Aaron Sorkin

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts. ~ Sinclair Lewis

There is a something in the very tone of the man who has been with Jesus which has more power to touch the heart than the most perfect oratory: ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

He would be laughed at, that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger, at past fifty. And he will not have much better success, who shall endeavour, at that age, to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. ~ John Locke

There is something in the American project, something in simple American oratory, something in the hope and idealism of this frustrating and contradictory nation that still makes my spirits soar and my heart leap with optimism and belief. If only they understood how to make a cup of tea. ~ Stephen Fry

There is no power like oratory. Caesar controlled men by exciting their fears, Cicero by ... swaying their passions. The influence of the one perished; that of the other continues to this day. ~ Henry Clay

He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone. ~ Charles Churchill

Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both. ~ Mark Helprin

There is an atmosphere of well-sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it! ~ Albert Einstein

At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was something too distant to see, until he pulled a string attached to a shutter above, letting a ray of sunlight through to strike the dome exactly. Then it became clear: a little thing like a weathervane, with four sails black on one side and white on the other, began to whirl around as the light struck it. It illustrated a moral lesson, the Intercessor explained, for the black of ignorance fled from the light, whereas the wisdom of white rushed to embrace it.

{Alluding to William Crookes's radiometer.} ~ Philip Pullman

The scientific dictator of tomorrow will set up his whispering machines and subliminal projectors in schools and hospitals (children and the sick are highly suggestible), and in all public places where audiences can be given a preliminary softening up by suggestibility-increasing oratory or rituals. ~ Aldous Huxley

We may make an oratory of our heart wherein to retire from time to time to converse with Him in meekness, humility, and love. Every one is capable of such familiar conversation with God, some more, some less. He knows what we can do. Let us begin, then. ~ Brother Lawrence

We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets,39 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble. Doubtless they were trumpets that gave forth clear ringing tones, and sent a mighty vibration through brick and mortar. But the oratory of the Rev. Amos resembled rather a Belgian railway-horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled. ~ George Eliot

[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; ... Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, ... as have also long since our best English tragedies, as ... trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. ~ John Milton

The orator is the mouth (os) of a nation. ~ Philibert Joseph Roux

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory !! ~ Winston Churchill

Will this massive outcry [about pollution] continue long enough to have effective results? Will federal and state laws be enacted with effective enforcement clauses? Will people be concerned long enough to pay the bill through higher prices? Will towns tole lost jobs when it proves too costly to clean obsolete plants? ... I think so, but it sure won't be as easy as the present outcry and political oratory suggest. The answers to preserving a livable environment are not all simple, and some of the nuts now pushing simplistic cure-alls won't help bring about any lasting solutions. ~ Malcolm Forbes

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. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

In oratory the will must predominate. ~ David Hare

Terror is a powerful agent in overcoming the contumacious and self willed disposition, and is made use of in government, in religion, and in education.

The passion may be excited by the mere prospect of great suffering, but still more effectually by unknown dangers, uncertainties, and vast possibilities of evil, in matters keenly felt by the hearers.

The approach of unexperienced calamities is out to engender panic. Under a plague or epidemic people may be easily frightened into measures that in cool moments they would repudiate.

The sick and the depressed can readily be inspired with religious and moral terrors. History furnishes many examples of political oratory succeeding through the excitement of terror. ~ Alexander Bain

He..said..in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. He meant a thing to be remembered, but the young apostate by the rail at his elbow had already begun to sicken at the slow seeping of life. He could see the shape of the skull through the old man's flesh. Hear sand in the glass. Lives running out like something foul, night-soil from a cesspipe, a measured dripping in the dark. The clock has run, the horse has run, and which has measured which? ~ Cormac McCarthy

By God, if women had written stories,
As clerks had within here oratories,
They would have written of men more wickedness
Than all the mark of Adam may redress. ~ Geoffrey Chaucer

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said] ~ Mark Logue

We are gathered here, friends," he said, "to honor lo Hoon-yera
Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya, children dead, all dead, all murdered
in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men.
I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same
war in which lo Hoon-yera Mora-toorz tut Zamoo-cratz-ya died, my
own son died.

"My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.

"I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to
die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they
do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of
patriotic holidays.

"But they are murdered children all the same.

"And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the
hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the
day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and
viciousness of all mankind.

"Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes
and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like
pigs. That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and
shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

"I do not mean to be ungrateful for the fine, martial show we are about
to see - and a thrilling show it really will be . . ."

He looked each of us in the eye, and then he commented very softly, ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,
a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In the world of oratory, the cunning atheist declares himself a believer so as to preserve access to the rich fund of tales from religious texts and to powerful concepts like God, fate, angels, the soul, & the afterlife. ~ Agona Apell

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments. ~ Elbert Hubbard

If nothing else, my analysis of George W.'s oratory style had taught me that a sincere countenance and a confident stance were sufficient to distract your audience from the fact that you were talking rubbish. ~ Colin Cotterill

Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk. ~ Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

I may not be skilled at eloquent oratory , but for muttering angrily under one's breath, I have never met a more capable man. ~ Eli Brown

A bigot is a stone-deaf orator. ~ Kahlil Gibran

The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din. ~ Evelyn Underhill

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. ~ Sinclair Lewis

One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail. ~ Cormac McCarthy

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. ~ Jonathan Swift

Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

God looks not at the oratory of your prayers, how elegant they may be; nor at the geometry of your prayers, how long they may be; nor at the arithmetic of your prayers, how many they may be; not at logic of your prayers, how methodical they may be; but the sincerity of them he looks at. ~ Thomas Brooks

I wanted to visit the Capitol of our country, the center of our great civilization that stands like the sun in the solar system, sendin' out beams of power and wisdom and law and order, and justice and injustice, and money and oratory, and talk and talk, and wind and everything, to the uttermost points of our vast possessions, and from them clear to the ends of the earth. ~ Marietta Holley

The art of oratory was considered part of the equipment of a statesman. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Nothing could be more admirable than the manner in which for forty years he [Joseph Black] performed this useful and dignified office. His style of lecturing was as nearly perfect as can well be conceived; for it had all the simplicity which is so entirely suited to scientific discourse, while it partook largely of the elegance which characterized all he said or did ... I have heard the greatest understandings of the age giving forth their efforts in its most eloquent tongues-have heard the commanding periods of Pitt's majestic oratory-the vehemence of Fox's burning declamation-have followed the close-compacted chain of Grant's pure reasoning-been carried away by the mingled fancy, epigram, and argumentation of Plunket; but I should without hesitation prefer, for mere intellectual gratification (though aware how much of it is derived from association), to be once more allowed the privilege which I in those days enjoyed of being present while the first philosopher of his age was the historian of his own discoveries, and be an eyewitness of those experiments by which he had formerly made them, once more performed with his own hands. ~ Henry Peter Brougham

Let the Spirit be lacking, and there may be wisdom of words, but not the wisdom of God; the powers of oratory, but not the power of God; the demonstration of argument and the logic of the schools, but not the demonstration of the Holy Spirit, the all-convincing logic of His lightning flash, such as convinced Saul before the Damascus gate. When the Spirit was outpoured the disciples were all filled with power from on high, the most unlettered tongue could silence gainsayers, and with its new fire burn its way through obstacles as flames fanned by mighty winds sweep through forests. ~ Arthur Tappan Pierson

Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.
And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause. ~ Steven Erikson

Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory - all these have served, in H. G. Wells's phrase, as Doors in the Wall. ~ Aldous Huxley

The English Language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever. ~ Joss Whedon

Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Wisdom is not to be found in the art of oratory, or in great books, but in a withdrawal from these sensible things and in a turning to the most simple and infinite forms. You will learn how to receive it into a temple purged from all vice, and by fervent love to cling to it until you may taste it and see how sweet That is which is all sweetness. Once this has been tasted, all things which you now consider as important will appear as vile, and you will be so humbled that no arrogance or other vice will remain in you. Once having tasted this wisdom, you will inseparably adhere to it with a chaste and pure heart. You will choose rather to forsake this world and all else that is not of this wisdom, and living with unspeakable happiness you will die. ~ Nicolaus Cusanus

Why do you rant and brag with such a spate of words, as if you wanted to overwhelm me with a sort of tempest and deluge of oratory-which nevertheless falls with the greater force on your own head, while my ark rides aloft in safety? ~ Martin Luther

There is no true orator who is not a hero. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

My parents aren't artists or anything, but growing up in Wales, especially in a Welsh language school and community, they have this thing called the Eisteddfod where people compete in singing and acting and dancing and oratory all sorts of things. From a very young age, it's been a part of my upbringing. ~ Iwan Rheon

The loudmouthed pervert loudly, pervertedly, strode in, spewing his loud, perverted oratory the entire way. It ~ Satoshi Wagahara

But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.] ~ John Adams

Put your affairs in order, mortals," she boomed, as a gust of wind - yes, wind inside my shop - blew their hair back. "I will feast on your hearts tonight for the offense you gave me. So swears the Morrigan." I thought it was a bit melodramatic, but one does not critique a death goddess on her oratory delivery. ~ Kevin Hearne

The aim of forensic oratory is to teach, to delight, to move. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

I have been devoured all my life by an incurable and burning impatience: and to this day find all oratory, biography, operas, films, plays, books, and persons, too long. ~ Margot Asquith

Yet through delivery orators succeed, I feel that I am far behind indeed. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If you are giving a graduate course you don't try to impress the students with oratory, you try to challenge them, get them to question you. ~ Noam Chomsky

Oratory is good only if it has the qualities of fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment, while in the case of letters there is no such need whatsoever. ~ Isocrates

I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of women in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can. ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Its Constitution
the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence. ~ Rufus Choate

Some of the greatest and most lasting effects of genuine oratory have gone forth from secluded lecture desks into the hearts of quiet groups of students. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour. ~ Thomas Jefferson

Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. ~ George Saintsbury

A good turnout at church today. It had nothing to do with the mild weather and a desire to gossip and everything to do with my oratory skills, I am perfectly convinced. Indeed, if not for Mrs Attwood's new bonnet, I would have had the ladies' undivided attention. The gentlemen I was more certain of. They had no interest in bonnets, new or otherwise, and listened in pleasing silence, broken only by an occasional snore. ~ Amanda Grange

The Louis XIII style in perfumery, composed of the elements dear to that period - orris-powder, musk, civet and myrtle-water, already known by the name of angel-water - was scarcely adequate to express the cavalierish graces, the rather crude colours of the time which certain sonnets by Saint-Amand have preserved for us. Later on, with the aid of myrrh and frankincense, the potent and austere scents of religion, it became almost possible to render the stately pomp of the age of Louis XIV, the pleonastic artifices of classical oratory, the ample, sustained, wordy style of Bossuet and the other masters of the pulpit. Later still, the blase, sophisticated graces of French society under Louis XV found their interpreters more easily in frangipane and marechale, which offered in a way the very synthesis of the period. And then, after the indifference and incuriosity of the First Empire, which used eau-de-Cologne and rosemary to excess, perfumery followed Victor Hugo and Gautier and went for inspiration to the lands of the sun; it composed its own Oriental verses, its own highly spiced salaams, discovered intonations and audacious antitheses, sorted out and revived forgotten nuances which it complicated, subtilized and paired off, and in short resolutely repudiated the voluntary decrepitude to which it had been reduced by its Malesherbes, its Boileaus, its Andrieux, its Baour-Lormians, the vulgar distillers of its poems. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the U.S.A. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. ~ James Howard Kunstler

It is a simple truth that the human mind can face better the most oppressive government, the most rigid restrictions, than the awful prospect of a lawless, frontierless world. Freedom is a dangerous intoxicant and very few people can tolerate it in any quantity; it brings out the old raiding, oppressing, murderous instincts; the rage for revenge, for power, the lust for bloodshed. The longing for freedom takes the form of crushing the enemy- there is always the enemy!- into the earth; and where and who is the enemy if there is no visible establishment to attack, to destroy with blood and fire? Remember all that oratory when freedom is threatened again. Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

I am not much given to profanity, but when I am sorely aggravated and vexed in spirit I declare to you that it comes as such a relief to me, such a solace to my troubled soul, and brings me such Heavenly peace to every now and then allow a word of phrase to escape my lips which can serve me no other earthly purpose, seemingly, other than to render emphatic my otherwise mildly expressed ideas. ~ Col. Robert G. Ingersoll