Brevity
Quotes about brevity
- "Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead of persuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die with the hour." ~ Thomas Jefferson
- "Brevity is the soul of wit." ~ William Shakespeare
- "Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon." ~ Mark Twain Hannibal Courier-Post
- "I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still going." ~ William Norman Birkett, 1st Baron Birkett
- "Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending--sit down." ~ Winston Churchill
- "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything." ~ Voltaire
- "Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can also be a mercy." ~ Leonid S. Sukhorukov All About Everything
- "Let me explain something to you. Um, I am not "Mr. Lebowski". You're Mr. Lebowski. I'm the Dude. So that's what you call me. You know, that or, uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing." ~ The Dude
- Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
- Literally: I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.
- Translation: I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
- Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters: Letter XVI, 1657 (English Translation). Often misattributed to Mark Twain, as well as T.S. Eliot, Cicero, and others.