BRIAN

JENNER

A
SPEECHWRITER’S
NOTEBOOK 2024
Smart things you can put in
a speech when inspiration runs dry, you’ve
got no time, or the Wi-Fi’s not working.
We had a builder in during the summer to fix the roof. I gave
him a cup of coffee and felt I should make some conversation.
We had self-employment in common, so I told him about a
client who was refusing to pay me for a speech.
The builder was sympathetic, if a bit surprised that the going
rate for a wedding speech was £500. He told his own story of
a client who refused to pay for a tiling job. Then he said he had
delivered four wedding speeches in his life and he loved doing it.
He showed me on his phone the file he’d set up to collect
memories of his daughter for her wedding in July 2024. He said
before the wedding he’d shorten all the stories down to a few lines
on his computer and then learn them and put prompts on cards.
I felt humbled. That’s what I do. The builder knew the secret
of speechwriting: write down ideas, anecdotes and one-liners
when you find them, so you’re able to use them for speeches
in the year ahead.

Brian Jenner
thespeechwriter.co.uk
Bournemouth
September 2023
One of the leadership values of the Royal Navy is “cheerfulness”
because, they say, “no-one follows a pessimist”.
n i c k h e wat

Jerry Seinfeld talks about how great artists are like slalom skiers.
“I always say, ‘If I’m the skier Lindsey Vonn, I don’t care where
you put the gates on the mountain. Put ’em anywhere you want.
I’m going to make the gates.’”
Seinfeld continues, “That’s how you have to think: ‘I don’t
care what happens, I’m going to adjust to it.’”

Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

w i n s to n c h u rc h i l l

In ancient Greece, a man walks into a tailor’s shop with a pair

of ripped trousers.
Tailor says, “Euripides?”
Man says, “Yeah. Eumenides?”

This phase isn’t a passing of the torch. It’s a torching of the past.
m au l e r

There are two rules in life:

1) Never give out all the information.

Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but the ability
to start over.
f. scott fitzgerald
Carl Jung is the best spiritual physician for our age.

People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.

It is said that whenever a friend reported enthusiastically,
“I have just been promoted!” Jung would say, “I’m very sorry to
hear that but if we all stick together I think we will get through
it.” If a friend arrived depressed and ashamed, saying, “I’ve just
been fired,” Jung would say, “Let’s open a bottle of wine; this is
wonderful news; something good will happen now.”
Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life
and you will call it fate.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a
psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the
shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our
conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of
the unconscious.
I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this
world, leads the unrecognised spiritual need into perdition, if
it is not counteracted either by a real religious insight or by the
protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not
protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot
resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But
the use of such words arouse so many mistakes that one can only
keep aloof from them as much as possible.
Arthur J. Finkelstein was a political campaign expert. He famously said,
“I wanted to change the world. I did. I made it worse.” This passage was
part of a lecture he gave to the CEVRO Institut in 2011 in Prague.

I always love to start off these talks with a survey story that goes
back many, many years.
There was a questionnaire which we ask to this day, the kinds
of questions we ask.
It says from the following list of people, do you have a
favourable or unfavourable opinion of each? If you have no
opinion or never heard of the person, just say so.
Way back when, the first name was Richard Nixon. And this
person said they’d never heard of him.
The next name was the Governor of New York, Nelson
Rockefeller.
And they said they had never heard of him.
We asked the three questions about three persons who were
running for the US Senate.
And this person said they had never heard of any of them.
The next question on the survey was, What’s the most
important issue facing the United States today?
And he said, “Apathy.”
He was right. He was right then, and he’s right today.
The most overwhelming fact of politics is what people do not
know, rather than what they do know.
And in fact, in politics, it’s what you perceive to be true that’s
true, not truth.
This is a very difficult concept for people who are rational.
But for those of us who are engaged in politics, it has become
the norm.
The achievements of the Romans…

The main reason for the Romans becoming masters of the world
was that, having fought successively against all peoples, they always
gave up their own practices as soon as they found better ones.
m o n t e s qu i e u

The Romans judged their political system by asking not whether

it made sense but whether it worked.
to m h o l l a n d

Historically, the arts of rhetoric have helped enable a lot of rich

men to order the world to their profit and pleasure. Cicero is
no exception.
j oy c o n n o l ly

Seek not for words, seek only fact and thought, and crowding
in will come the words unsought.
horace

Notoriously vain (Berlusconi…dyed his hair, and had a facelift),

he liked to joke that pollsters had surveyed Italian women as to
whether they’d sleep with him: “30% said Yes,” he’d claim, “and
70% said, ‘What? Again?’”
A diplomat who says “yes” means “maybe”, a diplomat who says
“maybe” means “no”, and a diplomat who says “no” is no diplomat.
ta l l e y r a n d

La parole a été donnée à l’homme pour déguiser sa pensée.

ta l l e y r a n d

People are forever quoting Talleyrand’s remark that language

is only there in order to hide the thoughts of the diplomat (or for
that matter of any other shrewd and dubious person). But in fact
the very opposite is true. Whatever it is that people are determined
to hide, be it only from others, or from themselves, even things
they carry around unconsciously – language reveals all. That is
no doubt the meaning of the aphorism Le style c’est l’homme; what
a man says may be a pack of lies – but his true self is laid bare for
all to see in the style of his utterances.
v i c to r k l e m p e r e r , t h e l a n g ua g e o f t h e t h i r d r e i c h

The character of a diplomatic service is shaped by national

culture and history. A French diplomat once told me that his
colleagues in the Quai d’Orsay insisted, as the house style, that
all official documents should contain no exclamation marks and
as few question marks as possible. The result, my friend wryly
remarked, was that the service asked few questions and was
surprised by nothing.
s t ua rt m o l e

General Wesley Clark once asked Javier Solana the secret of his
diplomatic success. He answered: “Make no enemies, and never
ask a question to which you do not know or like the answer.”
Jordan Belfort…(the)…founder of Stratton Oakmont called
his autobiography The Wolf of Wall Street, presumably because
“Tales of a Parasite” would not have been as good for sales. It
is a memorably emetic book, full of simpering, sniggering self-
aggrandisement and insincere contrition…But it does contain one
paragraph which partly redeems the rest of the book and which
summarises the business model of “boiler room” stockbroking:
And what secret formula had Stratton discovered that allowed all these
obscenely young kids to make such obscene amounts of money? For the most
part it was based on two simple truths; first, that a majority of the richest one
percent of Americans are closet degenerate gamblers, who can’t withstand the
temptation to keep rolling the dice again and again, even if they know the dice
are loaded against them; and second, that contrary to previous assumptions,
young men and women who possess the collective social graces of a herd of
sex-crazed water buffalo and have an intelligence quotient in the range of
Forrest Gump on three hits of acid, can be taught to sound like Wall Street
wizards, as long as you write every last word down for them and then keep
drilling it into their heads again and again – every day, twice a day – for a
year straight.

I related a trick I learned from a high-powered corporate

attorney who specialised in negotiating multi-billion-dollar, multi-
party settlements. When a counterparty demanded something
particularly unreasonable, in lieu of countering with an indignant,
well-reasoned rebuttal, he learned to simply ask, “Wait. I don’t
understand. Can you please repeat that?” He told me with a
chuckle that even the most outrageously greedy negotiators tend
to run out of steam by the third time they’re forced to explain an
untenably selfish position.
j o h n b o w e , i h av e s o m e t h i n g to s a y

Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime

mortgage bond prospectus.
m i c h a e l b u r ry
Peter Drucker was an American writer on management. On the Drucker
Institute website they have a page where they gather together his most famous
misquotations. They reveal how a sentiment becomes a soundbite.

d ru c k e r n e v e r s a i d

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

d ru c k e r d i d s ay

Culture – no matter how defined – is singularly persistent.

d ru c k e r n e v e r s a i d

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

d ru c k e r d i d s ay

…no human being can possibly predict the future, let alone
control it.
d ru c k e r n e v e r s a i d

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence.

It is to act with yesterday’s logic.
d ru c k e r d i d s ay

A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger

is a temptation to deny reality.
d ru c k e r n e v e r s a i d

Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked;

leadership is defined by results not attributes.
d ru c k e r d i d s ay

Effective leadership – and again this is very old wisdom – is not

based on being clever; it is based primarily on being consistent.
d ru c k e r n e v e r s a i d

What gets measured, gets managed.

d ru c k e r d i d s ay

Unless we determine what shall be measured and what the

yardstick of measurement in an area will be, the area itself
will not be seen.
The cost of living crisis, what cost of living crisis?

The truth is, no matter how great my satisfactions in the later

part of my life, I don’t think I’ve ever felt as much excitement or
adrenaline as when I had no money. A friend who came from the
underclass of England once told me, “The only thing that money
can’t buy is poverty.” Maybe he really meant “happiness”, but the
point is, money gives you an edge, and without it, you become,
like it or not, more human. It is, in its way, like being back in the
infantry with a worm’s eye view of a world where everything,
whether a hot shower or a hot meal, is hugely appreciated.
o l i v e r s to n e , c h a s i n g t h e l i g h t

Misery cannot be understood without the pleasure that it

provokes.
h a r a l d jä h n e r

The best way to help the poor is to not be one of them.

lang hancock

That’s the thing about unhappiness. All it takes is for something

worse to come along and you realise it was actually happiness
after all.
t h e c row n , s e a s o n 2, dear mrs. kennedy

“Wie viel ist aufzuleiden!”(How much suffering there is to get

through!) Rilke spoke of “getting through suffering” as others
would talk of “getting through work.”
v i k to r f r a n k l , m a n ’ s s e a r c h f o r m e a n i n g

My friend can’t afford to pay his water bill. So I sent him a

Get Well Soon card.
Inventory
Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.
Four be the things I’d been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.
Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.
Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.
d o ro t h y pa r k e r

In Tennyson’s poem Sir Bedivere is mourning the passing of the

Round Table, and the dying Arthur reassures him.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/ And God fulfils himself
in many ways,/ Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

The poet Ogden Nash had this little saying: “Here’s a good rule
of thumb: Too clever is dumb.”

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your

government when it deserves it.
m a r k t wa i n

Burn old logs

Drink old wine
Read old books
Keep old friends
a l f o n s o x o f s pa i n
I found Laurie Maguire’s book on Shakespearean wisdom in Oxfam on
Turl Street in Oxford. It’s full of gems.

To see things from another’s point of view requires imagination.

It takes practice. It is difficult. Sometimes it is impossible until one
has experienced the same situation. Youth cannot imagine old age
– until it ages. Happiness cannot imagine misery – until caught in
the same despair. When King Lear puts his daughters through a
love test, asking them to quantify their emotions, Cordelia refuses
to cooperate. She sees things only from her stance – youthful,
principled, inflexibly honest. Would she have behaved this way
if, for one moment, she had seen things from her elderly father’s
point of view? If she had seen that beneath the bizarre test lay an
old man’s fear of being unloved? It’s a sobering thought that we
might create tragedy simply by being unimaginative…
But the good news is we can avoid tragedy by exercising our
imagination…
“See better”, Kent’s injunction to Lear, is not just a moral
injunction to a morally blind monarch. It is an encouragement
to us all.
w h e r e t h e r e ’ s a w i l l t h e r e ’ s a wa y

Wisdom is about overcoming self-deception and

enhancing connectedness.
j o h n v e rva e k e

Imagine I throw a spear into the dark. That’s my intuition.

Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear.
That’s my intellect.
i n g m a r b e rg m a n
Always try and say something about the deceased at a funeral. Here are some
uplifting sentiments to include in your eulogy.

Go out of this world, as you entered it. The same passage that you
made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again
from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe;
it is part of the life of the world.
“Our lives we borrow from each other...
And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life.”
(Lucretius)
m o n ta i g n e

Cotidie morimur – we die a little bit every day.

seneca

Au fond, si la mort n’existait pas, la vie perdrait son caractère

comique.
ro m a i n g a ry

What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but
the loss of the past.
milan kundera

After suffering a major heart attack, the Australian billionaire

Kerry Packer is said to have whispered to his sons, “I’ve been to
the other side, and there’s f*** all there.”

A British doctor once explained how to live a good life.

He said the idea is to die young, as late as possible.
a s h l e y m o n ta g u
And now there is one more little story that I should like to tell, to
conclude all of this with an image to remember. It is the fable of
a tigress who was pregnant and hungry, prowling about in great
distress, until she came at last upon a herd of goats, whereupon
she pounced. But as she sprang she gave birth to her little tiger,
and this incident so injured her that she died.
The goats, of course, had scattered. But when all was still,
they returned to graze and found the tiny tiger, warm and alive,
beside the dead body of its mother. Being generous-hearted,
gentle creatures, the mother goats took the little animal to
themselves and brought it up as one of their own. Learning to
eat grass, which is poor fare for tigers, the foundling grew up to
be a scrawny, very mild example of his species, and the members
of the herd got on very well with him. None paid attention to the
obvious difference in complexion, and the little tiger himself had
no realisation that he was the least bit different from the rest.
But then, one day, a big male tiger discovered the herd
and pounced. The goats scattered, but the little tiger, now an
adolescent, stood where he was. He felt no fear; he just stood
there. The big one blinked and looked again. “What is this?” he
roared. “What are you doing here among goats?” The little fellow,
not knowing that he was not a goat, was unable to grasp the sense
of the question. Embarrassed, he bleated and the other, shocked,
gave him a clout on the head. Confused, the little thing began to
nibble grass. “Eating grass!” the big one roared again, and the
scrawny cub only bleated.
Having studied the pitiful youngster for a while, the big male
took him by the nape of the neck and carried him to a pond
with a quiet surface, where he sat him down. “Now look into that
pond,” he said. The little tiger looked, and the big one, sitting
beside him, also looked into the pond.
 “Look at your face, mirrored there in the water,” he said,
“and now look at mine: this one is mine. You have the pot-face of
a tiger; have you not? You are not a goat.”
The cub became very quiet and thoughtful, absorbing the
image of himself as a tiger. Then, when the master felt he was
ready, he took him again by the neck and carried him to his
lair, where there were the remains of a gazelle recently killed.
Forcing a large piece of this raw flesh down the gagging throat
of the revolted, frightened little tiger, the big one compelled him
to swallow and gave him more, until, presently, he began to feel
the tingle of the warm blood going into his veins. This was a
new feeling altogether, and yet one congenial to his awakening
true nature. Stretching for the first time in his life in the manner
of a great cat, he suddenly heard his own throat emit, to his
amazement, a great tiger roar. Then said the old fellow: “Aha!
Now let us hunt together in the jungle.”

And the lesson of this fable? The moral?

The lesson is that we are all tigers – living among goats.
joseph campbell

“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive.
Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought
Kutuzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is
green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple
is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.
to l s toy , wa r a n d p e a c e

Darth Vader is going to the French bakery to get three baguettes

and two desserts. It’s his favourite: pain, pain, pain, tarte tatin,
tarte tatin.
I live in a scorned neighbourhood because we’re surrounded by rehab facilities.
But, for this reason, I discovered what “recovery” is. Recovering alcoholics turn
out to be among the world’s most formidable public speakers. Check out Chuck
Chamberlain on YouTube.

There is no possibility under heaven to satisfy the human ego.

It is an impossibility. Obsessions of the mind for money, power,
and sex can never be satisfied. No matter how much we have,
it is never enough.
This is a battle we win by giving up the fight.
Everything that we were conditioned to believe about life in home,
school and church has to be reversed when we grow up a little
bit…In this new life we have nothing to win, nothing to prove, and
we’re not going anywhere.
Any alcoholic is entitled to make a living, but if I were a preacher,
I would want my business on the side. I would not want to get up
and try to tell you monkeys what you want to hear. I would not
want my gas and water in your hands. If you don’t like me, you’ll
turn off my gas and water, so I’ve got to try to please you. I can’t
do that. I’d want my money coming in from somewhere else, so
I could tell you what I think!
In simple psychology they told us that the two great needs of
the individual are to be needed and to be loved. That is totally
backwards. The two great needs of the individual are to love and
to do.
The golden key to this thing called life is rigorous self-honesty.
Why? Because we have a monitor with us. We didn’t put it there
and we can’t dislodge it. The religious call it “conscience”.
I’m either going to run my life and take the consequences thereof
or I’m not going to run it and take the consequences thereof.
I can’t do both. For years I was the star of the show and the
master of ceremonies, and I had accomplished failure in every
department of life. I can’t run my life or any part of it. This is no
big deal to me because I’ve found out that I don’t need to.
A joke from David Graeber’s Debt, The First 5000 Years:

A missionary finds a Samoan lying on the beach…

Missionary: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away,
lying around like that.
Samoan: Why? What do you think I should be doing?
Missionary: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here.
Why not dry some copra, and sell it?
Samoan: And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: You could make a lot of money. And with the
money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra
faster, and make even more money.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more
trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have
to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of
other people to do it for you.
Samoan: Okay. And why would I want to do that?
Missionary: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines,
employees, with all that money – you could retire a very rich man.
And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on
the beach all day.

All that can accurately be said about a man who thinks he’s a
poached egg is that he is in the minority.
ja m e s bu r k e

Patient: Do these vaccines generate immunity?

Doctor: Only for the pharmaceutical companies.
I’ve been asked to give a speech on the benefits of eating dried
grapes...It’s all about raisin awareness.

A family friend – a Second World War Arctic convoy veteran, no

less – spoke wittily and well at his recent 100th birthday lunch.
When I congratulated him, he said: “D’you know who taught
me public speaking at petty officer school after the war? It was
Lt Philip Mountbatten, before he was Duke of Edinburgh. When
you stand in front of an audience, he told us, always remember
‘ABC-XYZ’. What’s that stand for? Always be cheerful – and
examine your zip.”
t h e s p e c tato r

Comedy is just truth in short sentences.

erica rhodes

We’d now like to open the floor to speeches disguised as questions.

c a rto o n

I have never once feared the devil, but I tremble every time I enter
the pulpit.
j o h n k n ox

De tous ceux qui n’ont rien à dire, les plus agréables sont ceux qui
se taisent.
c o lu c h e

To think critically is always to be hostile.

hannah arendt

What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent.

nietzsche
This is an extract from the essay The Power of the Powerless written in
October 1978 by Václav Havel, a Czech dissident. After the fall of the Berlin
Wall he became President of Czechoslovakia.

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window,

among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world,
unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to
the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity
among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that
he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his
ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how
such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming
majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in
their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions.
That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise
headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all
into the window simply because it has been done that way for
years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has
to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be
reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window;
someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because
these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of
the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil
life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
Some sane observations…

Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.

h a ru k i m u r a k a m i

When running up a hill, it is all right to give up as many times as

you wish – as long as your feet keep moving.
s h o m a m o r i ta

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your
thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.
d.t. suzuki

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.
rilke

Youthful misery is the unfortunate cost of true independence

of thought.
gonzalo lira

You can only predict things after they have happened.

eugène ionescu

It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.

w i l l i a m s a roya n

Technology is a way of organising the universe so that people

don’t have to experience it.
max frisch
The American humorist Robert Orben died this year aged 95. He was an
old-school gag writer. His gags seem to have become old-fashioned, but remain
delightfully innocent. We should keep them in circulation…

Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest
people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.
It has been said that many executives have within them the
seeds of greatness – and with that thought in mind, it gives me
great pleasure to introduce one of the seediest our industry has
produced.
He has always been a man of few words – and not too good at
spelling those.
The best way to handle retirement is to take all the money you’ve
saved for a rainy day – and move to the desert.
Is this man a salesman? He could sell microwave ovens to sushi
restaurants.
Our next speaker, you’ll be interested to know, played a very
important role in one of the world’s first brain transplants. He was
the donor.
A man thousands of people have called “friend” – mostly because
they can never remember his name.
It is not necessary to use humour in speeches. True. It is also not
necessary to wear shoes – but they help us get to where we want
to go.
If argument is necessary for adequate speech preparation and
rehearsal, consider this: If your speech runs 20 minutes and you’re
giving it to 300 people – that’s 100 hours of human existence
being placed in your care. It’s a considerable responsibility. Even
people who have time to kill don’t want to see it done with a blunt
weapon.
Stewart Brand, who writes well about sustainability, quotes this story that
he heard from Gregory Bateson.

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the

name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like
other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the
top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.
A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went
up into the roof of the dining hall with a pen knife and poked at
the beams and found they were full of beetles. This was reported
to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where
would they get beams of that calibre nowadays?
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested
that there might be on college lands some oak. These colleges are
endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they
called in the college forester, who of course had not been near the
college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.
And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was
wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the college
was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the
beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak
beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been
passed down from one forester to the next for five hundred years.
“You don’t cut them oaks, them’s for the College Hall.”
A nice story. That’s the way to run a culture.
The guru of improv theatre, Keith Johnstone, also died this year. He had some
brilliant counter-intuitive insights.

Start to weep and you’ll know what upset you.

Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self,
and makes your work mediocre.
There are people who prefer to say “yes” and there are people
who prefer to say “no”. Those who say “yes” are rewarded by the
adventures they have. Those who say “no” are rewarded by the
safety they attain.
When we tell people nice things about ourselves this is usually a
little like kicking them. People really want to be told things to our
discredit in such a way that they don’t have to feel sympathy. Low-
status players save up little titbits involving their own discomfiture
with which to amuse and placate other people.
Don’t come on to be funny – come on to solve problems.
At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble.
I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my
mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned
that my imagination wasn’t “good” enough. I learned that the first
idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene;
(3) unoriginal. The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic,
obscene and unoriginal.
The best laughs are on the recognition of truth.
Half the copybook wisdom of our statesmen is based on
assumptions which were at one time true, or partly true, but are
now less and less true day by day. We have to invent new wisdom
for a new age. And in the meantime we must, if we are to do any
good, appear unorthodox, troublesome, dangerous, disobedient to
them that begat us.
j o h n m ay n a r d k e y n e s

In the Talmud, we find a curious story of a master sage, Rabbi

Meir, who was praying for the death of two robbers. His famous
wife, Bruria, overheard his prayer and corrected him. “Let sins be
uprooted from the earth, and the wicked will be no more” (Psalm
104:35). It doesn’t say “Let the sinners be uprooted,” Bruria
corrected him. It says “Let the sins be uprooted.” You shouldn’t
pray that these criminals will die; you should pray that they should
repent. And then “the wicked will be no more.” Bruria, no doubt,
understood that the likelihood of these individuals changing
was slim, but our response – especially in the format of prayer –
should be to rehabilitate rather than to destroy.

If you see fraud, and you don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.
n a s s i m n i c h o l a s ta l e b

We trained hard…but it seemed that every time we were

beginning to form up in teams we would be reorganised. I was
to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by
reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the
illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and
demoralisation.
c h a r lto n o g b u r n , j r .
Big dreams live here, as do the genius and passion to make them
real. In an age of cynicism, this place still believes that the human
capacity to solve problems is boundless.
But so, it seems, is our potential to create them.
That’s what I’m interested in talking about today. Because if
I’ve learned one thing, it’s that technology doesn’t change who we
are, it magnifies who we are, the good and the bad.
Our problems – in technology, in politics, wherever – are
human problems. From the Garden of Eden to today, it’s our
humanity that got us into this mess, and it’s our humanity that’s
going to have to get us out.
���� commencement address by apple ceo tim cook

Jokes for a cruise ship presentation

I’m the only one on board with my own hips.
Even the portholes are bi-focal.
I don’t know how old that lady is I danced with last night but her
National Insurance number was 4.
I must still look young for my age because they haven’t started to
put prunes on my pillow at night instead of chocolates.
A frightened lady approached the captain with a worried
comment that there was water going down the stairs – it was a
force eight gale. He responded, “Madam, the time to concern
yourself is when the water is coming up the stairs.”
dav i d p y b u s , t h e o l d i e

The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on
a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The
brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much
new happens, and nothing is expected of you.
m a ry roa c h , s t i f f
The seeds of the future lie buried in the past.
optimus prime

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this

self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind.
c e rva n t e s

The world becomes of value only through extremes, but it exists

only thanks to mediocrity.
pau l va l é ry

Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s

revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And
this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love
all of humanity may be a worthy endeavour but, in a funny way,
it keeps the focus on the self, on the self ’s own moral or spiritual
wellbeing. Whereas to love a specific person, and to identify with
his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to
surrender some of yourself.
j o n at h a n f r a n z e n

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that

dimension of social life in which things really do become true if
enough people believe them.
dav i d g r a e b e r

Thank you for that introduction. This is a moment that I deeply

wish my parents could share.
My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously
said of me – and my mother would have believed it.
andrew neil
Rhetoric classes well into the sixteenth century almost uniformly
included the cautionary tale of the famous general Lyncestes, who
was accused of conspiracy against Alexander the Great.
Brought before a military tribunal to defend himself,
Lyncestes stuttered and stammered. His guards, growing weary
of waiting for an answer, were at length obliged to stab him with
their pikes, thus terminating his protracted defence. The mores
of the day were unironically clear: educated adults know how to
use their tongues. If Lyncestes had been innocent, he would have
found the words to say so.
j o h n b o w e , i h av e s o m e t h i n g to s a y

What set of principles or rules would enable millions of

youngsters to bend it like Beckham? The message is the same
when you read the biographies or autobiographies of successful
businessmen. They (or at least their ghost-writers) are more
articulate than Beckham. But, like Beckham, they describe their
achievements rather than explain them. More long-windedly,
they repeat John Paul Getty’s explanation of his business success:
“Strike oil.” They do not tell us the secret of their achievements
because they do not know.
j o h n k ay , o b l i q u i t y

Memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a
story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen
because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range
of people.
j.r. moehringer

Rhetoric is everywhere language is, and language is everywhere

people are. To be fascinated by rhetoric is to be fascinated by
people, and to understand rhetoric is in large part to understand
your fellow man.
s a m l e i t h , yo u ta l k i n ’ to m e ?
 The European Speechwriter Network (which includes
the UK Speechwriters’ Guild) is a membership
organisation that brings together people who write
speeches for governments and corporations.

We publish a lively newsletter with jobs, analysis

of speeches that have made the news and insights
that help you improve your own writing.

We organise at least one conference a year in

Oxford or Cambridge, as well as events and training.

We believe that public speaking is the oldest and

most civilised form of communication.

We encourage you to practise it at every opportunity.

(And if you don’t know what to say,

you know where to come…)

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