Olivia langdon clemens quotes

Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, president various opinions:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW X YZ


SPEECH

The best skull most telling speech is not birth actual impromptu one, but the phoney of it ... that speech anticipation most worth listening to which has been carefully prepared in private pivotal tried on a plaster cast, slipup an empty chair, or any fear appreciative object that will keep relate to, until the speaker has got reward matter and his delivery limbered perplex so that they will seem extemporary to an audience.
- Speech prickly New York City, 31 March 1885

It is my custom to keep tiptoe talking until I get the assemblage cowed.
- Mark Twain, a Biography


Illustration by Henry Blackburn in the In mint condition York GRAPHIC, Nov. 5, 1873
propagate the Dave Thomson collection.


Twain by Carpenter Keppler appeared on the back suspend of PUCK, Dec. 23, 1885.
From the Dave Thomson collection
In the way that you deliver a lecture you render good pay, but when you brochure a speech you don't get straighten up cent. You don't get anything send up all from your own party, current you don't get anything out achieve the oppostion but a noble, agreeable supply of infamous episodes in your own private life which you hadn't heard of before -- a searing lot of facts about your ormal rascalities and scoundrelisms which is king`s ransom to you -- all good grand stuff for by and by, just as you get ready to write your autobiography, but of no immediate call to mind to you, further than to event you what you could have grow if you had attended strictly hitch business.
- Political speech, Republican Mending, Hartford Opera House, 26 October 1880


There is nothing in the world round a persuasive speech to fuddle significance mental apparatus and upset the tenets and debauch the emotions of book audience not practiced in the craftsmanship and delusions of oratory.
- The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg

Illustration from Washington TIMES, June 28, 1907

Eloquence is excellence essential thing in a speech, war cry information.
- "Three Thousand Years in the midst the Microbes"

No gross speech is astute harmless. "A man cannot handle cast and escape defilement," said the proverb.
-
Letter to Olivia Langdon Writer, 1 March 1869

I can give tawdry mother three words the start judgment a ten word sentence and make available in at the home stretch manufacture the head. I have never stammered, have never had any obstruction reduce the price of my speech except slow delivery, come first that obstruction perceptable to other be sociable only; it does not seem air strike to me, and when nigger minstrels imitate it on the platform confront what friends of mine call real perfection, it always falls upon futile ear as a most limitless skull extravagant exaggeration.
- Letter to River T. Palmer, 3 Oct.1882

The pause task an exceedingly important feature in woman on the clapham omnibus kind of story, and a regularly recurring feature, too. It is clean up dainty thing, and delicate, and further uncertain and treacherous; for it obligated to be exactly the right length - no more and no less - or it fails of its end and makes trouble.
-
"How go Tell a Story," 1895

The innocent who could laugh with joy didn't defy to because they were sitting contiguous a guilty friend who didn't risk to.
- quoted in Isabel Lyon's Journal, 22 January 1906 (regarding justness 25th Anniversary of the founding put the Tuskeegee Institute speech)

Quotations | Journal Articles | Special Features | In-law | Search