"Public speaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said anything in his reply that could annoy Lord Anglesey, which looks as if he was not so highly pleased as the former supposed him to be. Gurwood said, 'We were all on thorns when he talked of faction, and the Duke replied, "Poor man, he was suffering very much, and he is not used to public speaking, so that he did not know what he was saying."' If ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... productions of Greek authors for Roman audiences. During this period the Romans gradually discovered the capabilities of their language for prose composition. The republican institutions of Rome, like those of Athens, were highly favorable to the art of public speaking. It was the development of oratory which did most to mold the Latin language into fitness for the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... of the work of a Salvation Army field officer might suggest that for such a position few qualities other than enthusiasm and some ability for public speaking are necessary. Such an idea is as wide of the mark as ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... in the arts and foresight of a political leader. He better understood the people than did his great political rival, and more warmly sympathized with their conditions and aspirations. He became a typical American politician, not by force of public speaking, but by dexterity in the formation and management of a party. Both Patrick Henry and John Adams were immeasurably more eloquent than he, but neither touched the springs of the American heart like this ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became necessary for the commander to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he called upon a huge black man named Toby to address the company in his stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the wall, looking ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... me to write a sketch of my life and more especially of my adventures in the North-West. At first I hesitated before promising to comply with the request. There is a certain class of orators who, invariable, commence their public address by stating that they are "unaccustomed to public speaking." It may be true in many cases, but most certainly no public speaker was ever less accustomed to address an audience, than I am to write a book. Outside my limited correspondence, I never undertook to compose a page, much less a book. But, if any excuse were necessary, I ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... for public speaking, and seldom missed an opportunity of addressing the assembled officers and crews of the ships he took, before liberating or otherwise ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... canvass all day, and harangue all night. It can traverse immense distances without fatigue, make speeches in the open air without catching cold, sleep anywhere, eat anything, and even drink port with a grocer's label on it, at five in the afternoon. Then again, I had a natural and inborn love of public speaking, and I have known no enjoyment in life equal to that of addressing a great audience which you feel to be ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... of writers in this country is an affectation of eloquence. It is almost universally the fashion to aim, not at striking thoughts, simply and clearly expressed, but at splendid language, glowing imagery, and magnificent periods. It arises, perhaps, from the fact that public speaking is the almost universal object of ambition, and, consequently, both at school and at college, nothing is thought of but oratory. Vain attempts at oratory result, in nine cases out of ten, in grandiloquence and empty verbiage—common ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... not in search of "documents" Mrs. Amyot's success was hardly of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with the growing conviction that the "suffering" entailed on her by public speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately manipulating her public; and there must indeed have been a certain exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... sufficient words to express myself properly upon the subject, but gradually there came self-reliance, which enabled me to communicate my thoughts to others, and within a few weeks I had acquired a fluency of speech whereby I could talk for hours without embarrassment. During my first attempts at public speaking, few people would remain more than a moment or two to hear what I had to say, but with the increased force and power of speech, which I acquired with practice, my audiences grew larger and larger, until finally the streets were blockaded with their numbers at these ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... art of printing was invented, public opinion was molded almost entirely by public speaking, and for a great many years afterward the orator was the greatest of leaders. By the magic of his eloquence he changed the views of men and inspired them to deeds of valor. The fiery orations of a Demosthenes, of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... had been away to school, and during all that time he made a special study of public speaking. So good was he in the art of speaking that his college had heaped many honors upon him. He was chosen one of the speakers on graduation day, and most important of all, he had been chosen to represent his college in the annual oratorical contest with the other ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford
... Canons Regular of the Order of St. Augustine, and the reason for the founder's adoption of this Order, apart from the fact that it was somewhat fashionable at this period, may have been partly because his former occupation had particularly fitted him for public speaking, and partly because two, at least, of the men with whom he had been closely associated at Henry's court were themselves members of this order. And it is necessary to bear these facts in mind in considering the never-to-be-determined question of whether the apse of St. ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... occasion, and the Todborough contingent must show with its chief at its head. Who knows but you may want to contest the county again some of these days? and if you don't, why, perhaps I shall. I assure you I have a very pretty talent for public speaking—at least, so our fellows all say. ...
— Belles and Ringers • Hawley Smart
... which, in connection with a distinct articulation, enables one who speaks in the open air, or in a very large apartment, to send his voice to the most distant point. It is a certain degree of this quality, which distinguishes declamatory or public speaking or reading from private conversation, and no one can accomplish much, as a public speaker, without cultivating it. It must be carefully distinguished from the "high tone," which is an elevation of pitch, and from "loudness." or "strength" ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... There seemed to be much wonder in court circles there that America could produce so finished a gentleman as Mr. Lowell; and perhaps they had had some reason to doubt this, if they judged by the average American tourist. They wondered, too, at his delightful public speaking,—a thing to which Englishmen are not as much accustomed as Americans. They have a heavy, labored way of speaking, extremely painful to listeners accustomed to the ease of American speakers; and they were never ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... of Friends. His political interest was probably first kindled by the Preston election in 1830, in which Lord Stanley, after a long struggle, was defeated by "Orator" Hunt. But it was as a member of the Rochdale Juvenile Temperance Band that he first learned public speaking. These young men went out into the villages, borrowed a chair of a cottager, and spoke from it at open-air meetings. In Mrs John Mills's life of her husband is an account of John Bright's first extempore speech. It was at a temperance meeting. Bright got his notes muddled, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... prudishness could hail an emphatic oath in English from a French official with the exclamation, "Well, it sounds good to hear someone even swear in old Anglo-Saxon!" After two months of enforced silence, she was buoyant in reaching the British Islands once more, where she could enjoy public speaking and general conversation. Here she was the recipient of many generous social attentions, and, on May 25, a large public meeting of representative people, presided over by Jacob Bright, was called, in our honor, by the National Association of Great Britain. She ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... generally carried on by writing and reading, that the art of speaking distinctly, correctly, and agreeably, has become very much neglected. Practice in declamation accomplishes, as a general thing, very little in this direction. But we may expect that the increase of public speaking occasioned by our political and religious assemblies may have a favorable influence in ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... and makin' a pairty o't. We canna leave Bridesdale unproteckit, that means Sylvanus and Tryphena 'll be pit in chairge till we're back, and they gang to Sylvanus' ain fairm. Ony mair intentions?" Mr. Perrowne sought the chairman's eye, and addressed him. "Mr. Chairman, unaccustomed as I am to public speaking (derisive cheers), and unwilling as we are to obtrude our private affairs upon what Virgil calls the ignobile vulgus (hisses from Messrs. Errol and Bangs and the doctor), nevertheless, on this ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... he was admitted to the bar in Warrenton, where for two or three years he practiced his profession. His father dying in 1813, he abandoned his law practice, which he did not like, because he could not overcome his diffidence in public speaking; and, for quite a period, he had the management ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... then that the orator's years of hard work and close study told on him and that serious illness impended. It may be added, as a link with the past, that on hearing; Lincoln and Douglas in their debates, his courage and hopes as to advance through public speaking fell; yet ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... National Rose Test Garden as much from the fear of publicity that we, his friends, could not refrain from giving him, as for any other reason. He regretted in his later years that he had given up, during his editorial career, the little public speaking that he had previously done and had gotten so out of practice that, with his disposition, he could not ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... the local Granges were forums in which the members trained themselves in public speaking and parliamentary practice. Programs were arranged, sometimes with the help of suggestions from officers of the state Grange; and the discussion of a wide variety of topics, mostly economic and usually concerned especially ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... familiarity with political proceedings, the idea was extremely disagreeable to him. But on more mature reflection it was clear to him that he was in the hands of his friends, that he had said his say and had done all he would now be able to do in the way of public speaking or public writing, and that his only possible sphere of present action lay in exerting such ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... terms used by physiologists side by side with the originals. We cannot too strongly insist upon the necessity of forming a scientific basis for teaching singing, and, indeed, for training the voice for public speaking, &c. We congratulate Herr Behnke upon the patience and perseverance with which he has pursued his investigations with ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deep and somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in 1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from the University of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the age of sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... fond of writing and of public speaking," said Emerson, "I am a very poor talker, and for the most part prefer silence"; and he went on to compare himself in this respect with Alcott, "the prince of conversers." Alcott was undoubtedly the prince of fluency, and Emerson rarely, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... chief Speak House of the isle, a menace to ambition. Nabakatokia was more fortunate; his life and the royal style were spared to him, but he was stripped of power. The Old Men enjoyed a festival of public speaking; the laws were continually changed, never enforced; the commons had an opportunity to regret the merits of Nakaeia; and the king, denied the resource of rich marriages and the service of a troop of wives, fell not only in ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman "strong-minded," austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of "woman's rights." True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly pure, unselfish, true, refined, without ambition, impelled by the highest motives, and guided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... enlighten the ignorant, and relieve the sorrows of human-kind. This idea has not taken so firm a hold of the christian public as its importance deserves. How useful might some, who have little talent either for learning or public speaking, become, would they disinterestedly devote their lives to the acquisition of money for purposes of beneficence. Wealth, pursued with this spirit, will never beget avaricious desires, and thus acquired, will be a treasury of ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... the destiny of the writer of this Story to be occupied throughout her life, in what has the least suited either her inclination or capacity—with an invincible impediment in her speech, it was her lot for thirteen years to gain a subsistence by public speaking—and, with the utmost detestation to the fatigue of inventing, a constitution suffering under a sedentary life, and an education confined to the narrow boundaries prescribed her sex, it has been her fate to devote a tedious seven years to the unremitting labour of literary ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... profession, false to my scientific knowledge. I could not do it. And yet—when did a man in my position ever get such a chance as that which was offered to me this day? I was ready with my tongue and fond of public speaking; from boyhood it had been my desire to enter Parliament, where I knew well that I should show to some advantage. Now, without risk or expense to myself, an opportunity of gratifying this ambition was given to me. Indeed, if I succeeded ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... Oliver said to them, "Go and examine this thing, and in the name of God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it. You will see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison to everybody." Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six weeks—there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches, and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand—they got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was reconstituted ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... kind properly handled. Perhaps the best man on this sort of thing in the campaign was Mullins, the banker. A man of his profession simply has to have figures of trade and population and money at his fingers' ends and the effect of it in public speaking ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... the bogus Holmes, the bogus Longfellow, always hoping —but with a gradually perishing hope that somebody—would laugh, or that somebody would at least smile, but nobody did. I didn't know enough to give it up and sit down, I was too new to public speaking, and so I went on with this awful performance, and carried it clear through to the end, in front of a body of people who seemed turned to stone with horror. It was the sort of expression their faces would have worn if I had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... no thought of doing public speaking as her only means of earning her living. She continued to look for positions, but without success. Finally she took a district school in Bucks County, at a monthly salary of twenty-five dollars. So interested ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... Self-Confidence in Speech and Manner How to Read and Declaim How to Speak in Public How to Develop Power and Personality in Speaking Great Speeches and How to Make Them How to Argue and Win Humorous Hits and How to Hold an Audience Complete Guide to Public Speaking Talks on Talking Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases The World's Great Sermons Mail Course in Public Speaking Mail Course in Practical English How to Speak Without Notes Something to Say: How to Say It Successful Methods of Public Speaking Model Speeches for Practise The Training of a Public ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... which had gathered to greet him, but he persisted in speaking on the following day at Indianapolis. He paused in Chicago only long enough to give a public address, and then passed on into Iowa.[878] Among his own people he unbosomed himself as he had not done before in all these weeks of incessant public speaking. "I am no alarmist. I believe that this country is in more danger now than at any other moment since I have known anything of public life. It is not personal ambition that has induced me to take the stump this year. I say to you who know me, that the presidency has no charms for me. I do not believe ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... Holmes as President of the day, at the annual dinner of the Harvard Alumni Association, in Cambridge, July 19, 1860, inaugurating the practice of public speaking at the "Harvard Dinners." That year also took place the inauguration of President C. Felton, an event to which the speaker alludes in his graceful reference to the "goodly armful of scholarship, experience and fidelity" once more filling the "old ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... are spent in the military or naval service of their country are not, as a rule, accustomed to public speaking. It is actions, not words that are demanded of them, those actions, properly conducted and carried out being the safety and security ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... assistant to old Purcell, Half Street. He talks a d—d lot of stuff—blasphemous stuff, too; but if somebody'd take and teach him and send him into Parliament, some day he'd make 'em skip, I warrant yo. I never heard onybody frame better for public speaking, and I've heard ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with their names attached, which could in any way be tortured into a libel. Parris lets fall expressions which show that he was on the watch for something of the kind to seize upon, to transfer the movement from the church to the courts. Entirely unaccustomed to public speaking, these three farmers had to meet assemblages composed of their opponents, and much wrought up against them; to make statements, and respond to interrogatories and propositions, the full and ultimate bearing of which was not always apparent: any unguarded expression might be fatal to their cause. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham |
