Political Speech Quotes

#1. There is no reason for the government to limit political speech.

Penn Jillette

#2. If you can come up with a snappy little slogan, then you have a future in winning tagline competitions or being a political speech writer.

Mark Victor Hansen

#3. I believe in freedom of speech. And I believe that spending on political campaigns is a form of political speech that is protected under the constitution.

Marco Rubio

#4. I'm really proud of this Supreme Court and the way they've been dealing with the issue of First Amendment political speech.

Mitch McConnell

#5. The DISCLOSE Act is a testament to the wisdom of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United. The First Amendment sought to place political speech beyond the government's control, and we can be glad that it did.

Bradley A. Smith

#6. I didn't make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years. And I just focused almost exclusively on my initiatives for national crime legislation, foreign policy issues ...

Joe Biden

#7. I understand what a normal political speech is. You get up there, tell a few jokes, you have the flags behind you, and you speak for 10 or 15 minutes in broad generalities.

Bernie Sanders

#8. The New York Times editorial page is like a Ouija board that has only three answers, no matter what the question. The answers are: higher taxes, more restrictions on political speech and stricter gun control.

Ann Coulter

#9. You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

Bob Geldof

#10. I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#11. Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech.

James L. Buckley

#12. Countries that censor news and information must recognize that from an economic standpoint, there is no distinction between censoring political speech and commercial speech. If businesses in your nations are denied access to either type of information, it will inevitably impact on growth.

Hillary Clinton

#13. As a matter of fact, I didn't make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years.

Joe Biden

#14. The term faith-based is nothing more than an attempt to slip religion past you when you're not thinking; which is the way religion is always slipped past you. It deprives you of choice; choice being another word the political-speech manipulators find extremely useful.

George Carlin

#15. Elections are the formal processes by which those decisions are recorded. The regulation of the quantity, content and timing of political speech is clearly unrelated to regulating an election's "time" or "place." Can

Anonymous

#16. You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share.

Glenn Greenwald

#17. You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.

Glenn Beck

#18. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

G.K. Chesterton

#19. Whether it's people walking off 'The View' when Bill O'Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.

Eric Cantor

#20. Mainly, it's not that there are things you can't say. It's that there are things you can't say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.

Oliver Burkeman

#21. The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.

Bell Hooks

#22. When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

Thomas L. Friedman

#23. Listening to a speech by [Neville] Chamberlain is like paying a visit to Woolworth's, everything in its place and nothing above sixpence.

Aneurin Bevan

#24. In terms of political contributions, the free speech rights of corporations I don't think deserve the same protections as the free speech rights of real living, breathing, voting humans.

Chris Coons

#25. I am absolutely opposed to political correctness. You cannot confront hate speech until you've experienced it. You need to hear every side of the issue instead of just one.

Jane Elliott

#26. I would hope to inspire in my listeners a feeling of freedom - of speech, thought and political activity.

John Hall

#27. I think almost every political leader is always told that the next speech they make is the most crucial one.

Iain Duncan Smith

#28. The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.

William L. Shirer

#29. The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more free speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens.

Timothy Snyder

#30. Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong ... This [is] mostly BS.

Jeffrey A. Miller

#31. The thing I have come to find astonishing is that people from all political sides routinely say that the Internet has to be the model of free speech and freedom.

Beeban Kidron

#32. Depending on your political orientation, the Dixie Chicks are either the great defenders of free speech or American traitors.

Shawn Amos

#33. He was one of the few political leaders I have ever met whose public speeches revealed more than his private conversations. [On Ronald Reagan]

Gerald R. Ford

#34. Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality ... You can't 'stay the course' because you don't have a course.

Juan Cole

#35. Deliberation is not a particular type of speech, but a political act of collective decision-making in consideration of consequences.

F. David Mathews

#36. I had a right to my own political opinions. I am a Southern woman, born with Revolutionary blood in my veins. Freedom of speech and of thought were my birthright, guaranteed, signed and sealed by the blood of our fathers.

Rose O'Neal Greenhow

#37. A politician or political thinker who calls himself a political realist is usually boasting that he sees politics, so to speak, in the raw; he is generally a proclaimed cynic and pessimist who makes it his business to look behind words and fine speeches for the motive. This motive is always low.

Mary McCarthy

#38. Barbara Jordan is one [of the political heroes]. Her 1976 speech in New York inspired me to get into politics.

Donna Brazile

#39. As we saw in the Queen's Speech, anti-social behaviour - a phenomenon that I believe to be a genuine worry that is also being fed by a lot of scare stories - is the political theme of the moment.

Kamal Ahmed

#40. A plan without action isn't a plan, it's a speech.

T. Boone Pickens

#41. If I was to interrupt this article every few sentences, asking you whether or not I was making a good impression on you, I hope and believe that you would think I was a servile jerk. Yet this is what our politicians are doing in every speech.

Christopher Hitchens

#42. Political leaders normally act by making convincing speeches.

Helmut Schmidt

#43. Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.

Hannah Arendt

#44. Each having thus delivered himself of words which meant nothing, both now seated themselves and proceeded to look mighty grave.

Emerson Hough

#45. Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech.

Aristotle.

#46. Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

June Jordan

#47. Every Democrat constituency group has at least two things in common. They hate us. They despise opposition. That's why they created political correctness. Speech censorship. They hate opposition and they'll do anything they can to eliminate it.

Rush Limbaugh

#48. On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

Ed Gillespie

#49. Individual rights always go along with the interests of the society. I want to add that in Vietnam we have no political prisoners. No one is arrested or jailed for his or her speech or point of view. They are put in jail because they violated the law.

Nong Duc Manh

#50. Freedom of speech ... Freedom of worship ... Freedom from want ... Freedom from fear.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#51. I am a technological activist. I have a political agenda. I am in favor of basic human rights: to free speech, to use any information and technology, to purchase and use recreational drugs, to enjoy and purchase so-called 'vices', to be free of intruders, and to privacy.

Bram Cohen

#52. Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#53. It is not so much freedom of speech but the right to truth that great men protect.

Criss Jami

#54. Hundreds of political prisoners still suffer in Tibetan prisons. Freedom of speech is not allowed in any sense. It is illegal to possess a photo of the Dalai Lama.

Joanna Lumley

#55. Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.

Rodney A. Smolla

#56. Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.

Glenn Greenwald

#57. Congress-these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage.

Mary McCarthy

#58. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant.

Nikola Tesla

#59. I fight, and have fought, for political freedom, for justice and for fairness and freedom of speech.

Teresa Heinz

#60. Kindness is not a word much at home in current political and religious speech, but it is a rich word and a necessary one.

Wendell Berry

#61. What is the best thing that happens if we refuse to abide by the dictates of political correctness? I believe that we could return to a nation that truly cherishes freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Ben Carson

#62. 'Negative liberty' is a political science term meaning a liberty from government action. It is not a liberty to anything - like the liberty to meaningfully contribute to public debate or to have ample spaces for speech.

Marvin Ammori

#63. Manchester is a city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#64. The political function of 'the right of free speech' is to protect dissenters and unpopular minorities from forcible suppression - not to guarantee them the support, advantages, and rewards of a popularity they have not gained.

Ayn Rand

#65. Freedom of speech trumps political correctness. I would say our magazine would publish an anti-Semitic or Holocaust denying cartoon if it meant Jews around the world were rioting because of it and burning embassies because of a cartoon. We would want to show our readers what all the fuss was about.

Ezra Levant

#66. I've got a great sense of where I want to lead and I'm comfortable with why I'm running. And, you know, the call on that speech was, beware. This is going to be a tough campaign.

George W. Bush