On Speaking Well Quotes

“Hubert Humphrey’s wife is said to have advised him: “Darling, for a speech to be immortal it need not be interminable.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“What do you think of your job as? What service are you performing in society? What’s the point of what you do?”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“big things are best said, are almost always said, in small words.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Where you falter, alter.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“…On the wall of my room when I was in rehab was a picture of the space shuttle blasting off, autographed by every astronaut now at NASA. On top of the picture it says, “We found nothing is impossible.” That should be our motto. Not a Democratic motto, not a Republican motto, but an American motto. Because this is not something one party can do alone. It’s something we as a nation must do together. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible. Then they seem improbable. And then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.…”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“there was once a time, long ago, when politicians didn’t seem to think they had to sound as if they were speaking emotionally or personally. They thought they had to speak intelligently, and persuasively.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“history is not only made by people, it is people.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Bad taste is a virus that gains strength as it spreads. People want to imitate it and outdo it.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“a speech is shaped, ultimately, by the overwhelming desire that nothing bad happen, then nothing good will happen either. The speech will sound mealy-mouthed and nervous.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“They weren’t trying to self-consciously fashion a phrase that would grab the listener. They were simply trying to capture in words the essence of the thought they wished to communicate.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Style is not a replacement for substance, and cannot camouflage a lack of substance.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“The words and phrases you use must not only be “hearable” by the audience, they must be”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“write for listeners as opposed to readers.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“(Oddly enough, the more tired you get as you write and rewrite, the more likely you are to abandon any self-conscious semi-stentorian writing and write more like yourself. Fatigue lets you emerge. This is good.)”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“you can’t say everything, the fact that you have to winnow your thoughts down to the essentials, means that you can get to the heart of the matter quickly.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“a speech about everything is a speech about nothing.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“it is harder to decide what you want to say than it is to figure out how to say it.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“I think that to achieve true adulthood is to understand the simplicity of things.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Outside of a person’s love, the most sacred thing that they can give is their labor." -- James Carville”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech With Style, Substance, and Clarity

“You must be able to say the sentences you write. And so they cannot be long and serpentine things that curl around clauses, caress subclauses, encompass extended metaphor, stop briefly for a whimsical digression and culminate, ultimately, in a long and rhythmic peroration that signals to your audience that you would not take it unkindly if they, at just about this moment, would interrupt you with vigorous and sustained applause.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“People don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Every speech has a job to do, and no matter who you are, pope, president, poet or pipe layer, if you’re giving a speech you have to understand what its job is and work to make sure it’s done.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em—tell ’em—then tell ’em what you told ’em.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“Always reduce it down. This keeps it from having a false bigness in your mind, and allows you to get your hands around it. Another way to get a handle on what you want to say is to ask: What does this speech have to do? Every speech has a job, a reason for being.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“When you are thinking about what you want to say, it is often helpful to define it down, in your own mind, to a sentence or two.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“We singe but never burn.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“NO SPEECH SHOULD LAST MORE THAN TWENTY MINUTES”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity

“It is usually and paradoxically true that the more important the message, the less time required to say it.”
― Peggy Noonan, On Speaking Well: How to Give a Speech with Style, Substance, and Clarity