Impromptu Speaking

AGENDA:

Read over the handout.
After you are assigned (or select a speaker number),  choose one quotation from the 3 that are listed. You have 5 minutes to think about and prepare a 3 minute speech about your quotation. Then give your speech!

Speaker #1: 

1.     “They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”  – Andy Warhol

2.     “I’ve been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.” – Barack Obama

3.     “Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”  –  Henry David Thoreau

Speaker #2:

1.     “No question, 2006 was a lousy year for Iraq.” – Pres. George W. Bush

2.     “We did not change as we grew older; we just became more clearly ourselves.” –  Lynn Hall

3.     “College isn’t the place to go for ideas.”  – Helen Keller

Speaker #3:

1.     “Thank you to every American who hasn’t sued me so far.” – Sacha Baron Cohen

2.     “The more things change, the more they remain… insane.” – Michael Fry and T. Lewis

3.     “Fathers send their sons to college either because they went to college or because they didn’t.”  –  L.L. Henderson

Speaker #4:

1.     “Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.”  –  Norman Douglas

2.     “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”  –  Martin Luther King, Jr.

3.     “Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”  – George Bernard Shaw

Speaker #5:

1.     “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”  – Einstein

2.     “I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.”  –  Wilson Mizner

3.     “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”  –  Alan Kay

Speaker #6:

1.     “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”  –  Joseph Chilton Pearce

2.     “Excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism.”  –  Oprah Winfrey

3.     “There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis.” – Malcom Gladwell

Speaker #7:

1.     “The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.”  –  Lois McMaster Bujold

2.     “Woman is woman’s natural ally.”  –  Euripides

3.     “That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.”  –  Aldous Huxley

Speaker #8:

1.     “Always do sober what you say you’ll do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”  –  Ernest Hemingway

2.     “It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature has no equality. Its sovereign law is subordination and dependence.”  –  Marquis de Vauvenargues

3.     “I’ve never been a millionaire but I just know I’d be darling at it.”  –  Dorothy Parker

Speaker #9:

1.     “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means of going backwards.”  –  Aldous Huxley

2.     “Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be.”  –  Rita Rudner

3.     “In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.”  – Samuel Johnson

Speaker #10:

1.     “When I meet a man I ask myself, ‘Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?’  –  Rita Rudner

2.     “We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.”  –  Samuel Johnson

3.     “Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”  – Oscar Wilde

Speaker #11:

1.     “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”  –  Oscar Wilde

2.     “Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”  –  George Santayana

3.     “The truth will set you free.  But first, it will piss you off.”  –  Gloria Steinem

Speaker #12:

1.     “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”  –  Oscar Wilde

2.     “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  – Benjamin Disareli

3.     “Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?”  – James Thurber