16 Quotes by David Josiah Brewer

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.

The better life rests less on the prohibitions of the Ten Commandments and more on the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Golden Rule.

A nation may be born in a day, but the great truths which make for the glory and uplift of the race only through long ages permeate and control humanity. We must have the divine patience and understand the divine mathematics of a thousand years as one day.

Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel!

Christianity is entitled to the tribute of respect. I do not of course mean that all individuals, nominally Christian, deserve trust, confidence, or even respect, for the contrary is too often the case. Too often, men hold religion as they do property - in their wives' names.

The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic.

The time has passed in the history of the world when anything is too sacred to be touched, when anything is beyond the reach of the inquiring and scientific spear.

It is Mormonism, Mohammedanism and heathenism and not Christianity which have proclaimed polygamy and debased woman from the sacred place of wife to the lower level of concubine. It is not Christianity which has sustained the social evil.

He who is honest in his dealings simply because of the social prestige and position it secures will never develop his higher nature, but will always live along the lower lines.