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 is the fundamental quality of style, a quality so essential that no degree of ornament can atone for its absence.
• George Campbell — 1719-1796 · Eloquence is that art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end.
• Marcus Tullius Cicero — 106-43 BCE · Let arms yield to the toga.
• 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 the surest index of a sound understanding.
• Marcus Fabius Quintilianus — c. 35 - c. 100 CE · A good man skilled in speaking.
• Richard Whately — 1787-1863 · A presumption in favour of any supposition means, not that it is antecedently probable, but that it must stand good till some sufficient reason is adduced against it.