Rhetoric on Simposeum

10 thinkers, each answering from their own writing with a citation to the page.

• John Quincy Adams — 1767-1848 · Eloquence is the child of liberty.
• Hugh Blair — 1718-1800 · Perspicuity, it will be readily admitted, is the fundamental quality of style; a quality so essential in every kind of writing, that for the want of it, nothing can atone.
• George Campbell — 1719-1796 · The word eloquence, in its greatest latitude, denotes that art or talent by which the discourse is adapted to its end.
• Marcus Tullius Cicero — 106-43 BCE · Eloquence is the attendant of peace, the companion of ease and prosperity, and the tender offspring of a free and well-established constitution.
• Demosthenes — 384-322 BCE · It cannot be that you were wrong, men of Athens, when you took upon you the struggle for freedom and deliverance.
• Frederick Douglass — 1818-1895 · You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.
• François Fénelon — 1651-1715 · True eloquence has nothing of the inflated or the ambitious.
• Isocrates — 436-338 BCE · The power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding.
• Marcus Fabius Quintilianus — c. 35 - c. 100 CE · My aim, then, is the education of the perfect orator.
• Richard Whately — 1787-1863 · The burden of proof lies on the side of him who would dispute it.