Brevity

Quotes about brevity:

• 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, attributed in Robert Andrews, Famous Lines: a Columbia dictionary of familiar quotations (1997)

• Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending--sit down.
  • Winston Churchill^{[citation needed]}

• 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, letter to David Harding, April 20, 1824, "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson" (1854), ed. Henry Augustine Washington, vol. 7, p. 347

• 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, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others.

• Brevity is the soul of wit.
  • William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, sc. ii

• Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
  • Commonly attributed to Mark Twain, but not found in any collection of his writings.

• Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.
  • The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
  • Voltaire, "Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738)