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Borrowing Another's Words for Your Advantage - Using Quotations to Spice up Your Speech

Quotations give speeches emotional impact by citing authorities agreeing with what the speaker has been saying. If the quotation's source is famous, you, as a speaker, also acquire the prestige of your source. For example, it's one thing for you to say cigarette smoking is causing a healthcare catastrophe, but quoting the highly-respected former Surgeon General of the United States, C. Everett Koop, to support your assertion adds weight to your claim.

• "Smoking is associated with more death and illness than drugs, alcohol, automobile accidents and AIDS combined."

In a Presidential appeal for togetherness with the Republican Congress during his second inaugural address, President Clinton quoted the recently deceased Cardinal Bernardin and borrowed some of the latter's prestige:

• "Let us remember the timeless wisdom of Cardinal Bernardin when facing the end of his own life: 'It is wrong to waste the precious gift of time on acrimony and division.'"

Although Abraham Lincoln was plagued by accusations of not practicing a formal religion, his speeches are dotted with Biblical language, references and quotations. During his acceptance speech for the Republican Illinois Senatorial nomination on June 17, 1858, Lincoln quoted Mark 3: 25 and created an analogy to express his views of slavery, an issue then tormenting America.

• "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

Delivering his farewell address to Congress on April 19,1951, just over a week after he was relieved of command by President Truman, Douglas MacArthur recalled a song sung by West Point Cadets nearly half a century before.

• "When I joined the Army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the Plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that-'Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.' And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just face away-an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good bye."

In 1990, Nelson Mandela spoke to fifty thousand people after being released from nearly three decades of imprisonment in South Africa. He concluded his speech by quoting from his last speech, delivered twenty-seven years before as he stood in a courtroom awaiting sentencing.

• "In conclusion I wish to go to my own words during my trial in 1964. They are true today as they were then. I quote: 'I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. Amandla (power)!'"

Speakers have often used the compressed, emotional language of poetry to express their own sentiments more powerfully. Senator Edward Kennedy conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to Jimmy Carter on August 12, 1980, and concluded with a stirring quotation uniting the Democratic Party.

• "And may it be said of us (the Democratic Party), both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: 'I am a part of all that I have met/Tho' much is taken, much abides/That which we are, we are--/One equal temper of heroic hearts/strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

President Ronald Reagan and his speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, used short sections of poems to summarize President Reagan's feelings. On June 6, 1984, the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion, Reagan spoke to a group of veterans in Normandy, France.

• "Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life…and left the vivid air signed with your honor'…"

Ronald Reagan concluded his speech following the deaths of seven astronauts in the space shuttle Challenger explosion by quoting from the sonnet "High Flight" written by John Gillespie Magee, a nineteen-year-old Canadian Spitfire pilot who was killed during World War II in December 1941. Peggy Noonan remembered the poem from school and applied it to this tragic moment.

• "The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor that last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved good bye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"