Oration Quotes

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration nay, it is a very easy matter but to produce a better in its place is a work extremely troublesome. (Plutarch)
Nature paints the best part of a picture, carves the best parts of the statue, builds the best part of the house, and speaks the best part of the oration.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For as lack of adornment is said to become some women, so this subtle oration, though without embellishment, gives delight.
Cicero
My eyes are fully open to my awful situation, I shall go at once to Roderic and make him an oration, I shall tell him I've recovered my forgotten moral senses, and I don't care tuppence ha'penny for any consequences. Now I do not want to perish by the sword or by the dagger, but a martyr may indulge a little pardonable swagger And a word or two of compliment my vanity would flatter, but I've got to die to-morrow, so it really doesn't matter!
W. S. Gilbert
The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history... But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth". It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.
H. L. Mencken
Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers' back pages.
Edward Dahlberg