[22]
If, however, chance should impose the necessity upon us of
pleading a case at such short notice, we shall require
to develop special mental agility, to give all our
attention to the subject, and to make a temporary
sacrifice of our care for the niceties of language, if
we find it impossible to secure both. On such
occasions a slower delivery and a style of speaking suggestive of a certain indecision and doubt will
secure us time to think, but we must be careful to
do this in such a way as to give the impression of
thought, not of hesitation.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.