Top 121 Speeches Quotes

Speeches are much easier if you read them. I just find when I do that, it’s harder to fire up the crowd.

Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it.

If you look at the copies of Churchill’s speeches that have survived, they are heavily marked up. He was scrupulous about the impact of each word. He preferred short words and the repetition of short words. He knew everything about the techniques of rhetoric.

If you’re in Congress, you vote and give speeches. But governors have to make decisions every day, and presidents have to make decisions every day.

Hollywood is right. A good and strong movie can have a more powerful social impact than any and all political speeches or newspaper editorials and columns.

Ralph Nader is a hero. I know Ralph, and I call him up occasionally. He’s helped me out on a couple of occasions when I’ve given speeches to corporations where he’d have a good… He’d give me some good information.

I do all my speeches in pictures. If I wrote words, I’d get locked in on them.

While we have entertained the contention that a deed may make more propaganda than hundreds of speeches, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of pamphlets, we have held that an arbitrary act of violence will not necessarily have such an effect.

The only things I make money on are speeches and books.

It is the resolve of the government that none will be allowed to get away with making speeches that can cause sedition or that can cause violence, especially because when we make these kinds of pronouncement and do things that can cause violence or destruction of lives and property, we are no longer in control.

In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches, or town halls, we have Trump’s demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN.

One reason I do the live shows – and the monthly speeches at public radio stations – is to remind myself that people hear the show, that it has an audience, that it exists in the world. It’s so easy to forget that.

My philosophy is that you don’t motivate players with speeches; you have motivated players that you draft. That’s where they come in, and those are the guys that are competitive. You can not teach competitiveness.

I’ve probably given more speeches, been on TV more than any other member of the Court – or almost any other member of the Court.

When I was in high school, people would ask me what I wanted to do, and I would always say I wanted to ‘lead marches and give speeches.’

Always, with speeches, I feel like it’s an opportunity to say something.

O! Desolated Scotland, too credulous of fair speeches, and not aware of the calamities which are coming upon you! If you were to judge as I do, you would not easily put your neck under a foreign yoke.

I’d like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general – criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don’t just want to give speeches; I’d like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.

I’ve always watched the Hall of Fame speeches. Thought about what I would talk about if I ever was up there. But I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about wanting to be in the Hall of Fame. I really don’t.

You have to take a huge loss financially to do a play. You have to put aside the commercials and the speeches and the other things that put money on the table, and really save up to do it. And that’s what I’ve done here. But it’s worth it to me to be in a really good play.

Several speeches were made by the chiefs during the council, all expressive in the highest degree of their friendly disposition towards our government, and their conduct in every particular manifested the sincerity of their declarations.

When ‘Deadwood’ came along, it was totally like Shakespeare. The long speeches were like soliloquies. If one phrase of a monologue was out of whack, the entire one-page speech didn’t work.

I’ve spent too much time giving speeches, traveling the world.

Now there is a new request. To release transcripts of speeches that were given. When everybody agrees to do that, I will as well. It is important we all abide by the same standards. So let’s do the tax return standard first, because that has been the standard for a long time.

I try to talk about policy issues intelligently, I try very hard to avoid thought bubbles. I make sure my speeches are well researched and footnoted. I make sure I am not talking through my hat.

For my name and memory I leave to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.

While Fidel Castro used to deliver his marathon seven-hour speeches in Havana, Cubans used to joke that if Spanish lacked a future tense, their leader would be speechless. He was only fluent in broken promises, they lamented.

In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected.

I don’t like giving speeches. It makes me nervous.

I don’t want to spend my last few whatever it is, months or years on this earth, giving speeches.

I hate speeches.

If you go back and look at President Reagan’s speeches, they bring you to tears almost.

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

Modi is speaking about national unity, but the leaders of his party are openly saying in their speeches that if Muslims have to stay in India, they must live as second grade citizens. This is wholly unacceptable.

One of the challenges of commencement speeches is that you have this older, wiser person who is accomplished talking to young, not-yet-so-wise, not-yet-accomplished adults or, in high school or middle school, even younger.

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

Mourinho doesn’t need to give long speeches. He’s direct and to the point.

It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.

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.

Latin America is convinced that, starting with South America, our way forward is to consolidate the process of integration: not theoretical integration – the integration of speeches – but physical integration, with infrastructure, with roads, with railways, with communications, with energy.

Since becoming a BBC breakfast presenter I have been paid four-figure sums for doing hour-long speeches for associations and at awards dinners. That has been an eye-opener. I am surprised by how much people are willing to pay TV celebrities to do that kind of stuff.

There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

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.

I gave 738 Rotary Club speeches, and it was just driving me crazy, so someone said, ‘Why don’t you charge money?’

I write all of my own speeches.

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Your patience would fail you if I should continue to relate all the disrespectful speeches and treatment which your servants have been obliged to listen to and patiently to bear.

Trump needs to stick like glue to whomever writes his speeches and fire whomever told him Americans are up at night worried about the comfort and well-being of people who broke into our country illegally.

I’m a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word. I say something I didn’t think through adequately. I mean, I don’t type my speeches, then sit up there and read them off the teleprompter, you know. I wing it.

Why is it that Michael Flynn, who evidently has a great relationship with Putin, who has received payments for so-called speeches and who’s spent a lot of time in Russia and was accused of talking about sanctions, he lied about it, and he got caught?

Liberty doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in speeches.

I am quite a shy person. You say that to people, and they say, ‘You do interviews, speeches. How can you be shy?’ But, fundamentally, I am.

In a Western, you talk more with your eyes and your actions than you do with big speeches. I love that.