“Like a rough orator, that brings more truth
Than rhetoric, to make good his accusation.”

“A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance.”

Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) British author, literary critic, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography

“In this world of gossip, a good listener is rarer than a great orator.”

Christopher Pike (1954) American author Kevin Christopher McFadden

“Let the orator whom I propose to form, then, be such a one as is characterized by the definition of Marcus Cato, a good man skilled in speaking. But the requisite which Cato has placed first in this definition—that an orator should be a good man—is naturally of more estimation and importance than the other.”
Sit ergo nobis orator quem constituimus is qui a M. Catone finitur vir bonus dicendi peritus, verum, id quod et ille posuit prius et ipsa natura potius ac maius est, utique vir bonus.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

“I think that throughout this country there is to-day a far greater desire than there has ever been before to hear plain, unadorned statements of cases…Let us always remember this: when we come to big things we do not need rhetoric. Truth, we have always been told, is naked. She requires very little clothing. After all, St. Paul was no orator, and yet his speeches and his teachings seem to have spread and to have lasted a long time. I cannot help feeling that if we were to go back two thousand years I would back St. Paul and the results of his teaching against all the rhetoric of a Sunday paper or of the leading orators of the age.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“The man who labors to please his neighbor for his good to edification has the mind that was in Christ. It is a sinner trying to help a sinner. Even a feeble, but kind and tender man, will effect more than a genius, who is rough and artificial.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

“Like all great character assassination attempts, implication is much more effective than accusation.”

Steven Crowder (1987) American actor

“To one commending an orator for his skill in amplifying petty matters, Agesilaus said, "I do not think that shoemaker a good workman that makes a great shoe for a little foot."”

Plutarch (46–127) ancient Greek historian and philosopher

“Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

“The rhetoric of to-day, the rhetoric we have to consider, is the rhetoric of the "Bulging corn bins." I suppose that this gift has been responsible for more bloodshed on this earth than all the guns and explosives that have ever been invented. If we look back only over the last century, was there anything more responsible for the French Revolution than the literary rhetoric of Rousseau, fanned by the verbal rhetoric of Robespierre and others, just as the Russian Revolution was due to the rhetoric of Kerensky— flatulent rhetoric which filled the bellies of his people with the east wind? That appalling twopenny-ha'penny gift of fluency, with the addition of a certain amount of training and of imagination in word-spinning, is the kind of rhetoric which stirs the emotions of the ignorant mob and sets it moving. It is because such forces can be set in motion by rhetoric that I have no regard for it, but a positive horror.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom