Brevity

• "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, March 6, 1835

• "Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending--sit down."
  • Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

• "The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."
  • Voltaire

• "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
  • Blaise Pascal

• "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

• "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."
  • Lord (William Norman) Birkett (English lawyer and politician)