Top 97 Quotes About Human Speech
#1. Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.
George Steiner
#2. It seemed that, after contact with a few human generations, sand hogs would begin to understand human speech. The irony was that after coming to understand their riders fully, the beasts often ended up abandoning them and heading off into the wilderness.
Neal Asher
#3. True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.
Helen Keller
#4. Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech
Dan Simmons
#5. India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.
Mark Twain
#6. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
#7. A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.
Margaret Atwood
#8. Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
#9. The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?
Dennis Potter
#10. Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds - but with that word realized - with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#11. Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.
Herbert Bayer
#12. Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvelous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively.
George MacDonald
#13. My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky
#14. If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist.
Ned Rorem
#16. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.
Mahatma Gandhi
#17. Does a person have a right to change his or her own religion? This is a fundamental human right, just like a right to freedom of speech.
Miroslav Volf
#18. Whenever a man talks he lies, and so far as he talks to himself - that is to say, so far as he thinks, knowing that he thinks - he lies to himself. The only truth in human life is that which is physiological. Speech - this thing that they call a social product - was made for lying.
Miguel De Unamuno
#19. Human eloquence or persuasiveness of speech are the mere trappings of the dead, if the living Spirit be absent; the prophet may preach to the bones in the valley, but it must be the breath from Heaven which will cause the slain to live.
D.L. Moody
#20. Their silent wounds have speech
More eloquent than men;
Their tones can deeper reach
Than human voice or pen.
William Robert Woodman
#21. No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.
Peter Farb
#22. 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
#23. When there is liberty, you expect a higher degree of freedom and not human rights abuse.
Auliq Ice
#24. We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.
Andrew O'Hagan
#25. They judged me like they would judge themselves and that's what they could never understand, we are all human but we are not the same.
Nikki Rowe
#26. All the big powers they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.
Jack Kevorkian
#27. This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
George Orwell
#28. Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?
CrimethInc.
#29. Human life consists of doing certain things ... to take part in the life of the community; to be able to talk about subjects that interest me and there freedom of speech comes into it.
Amartya Sen
#30. Racism is a form of insanity. Human beings became racist when they started talking. Speech has a lot to do with it.
Paul Mooney
#31. Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.
Tom Wolfe
#32. Freedom rings bells to wake us from the comfort of beautiful dreams and empower the efforts that turn them into reality.
Aberjhani
#33. A tranquil mind, a truth-filled speech, and a body dedicated to service-one who has these three qualities is described as the embodiment of 'Triputi' (the Triple purity). Such a one is the noblest of human beings.
Sathya Sai Baba
#35. When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart.
Charlotte Bronte
#36. More and more Chinese intend to embrace freedom of speech and human rights as their birthright, not some imported American privilege.
Michael Anti
#37. The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech.
Gloria Steinem
#38. There is also hope that even in these days of increasing specialization there is a unity in the human experience.
Allan McLeod Cormack
#39. The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech.
George Jessel
#40. As human voice and instrument blend in one harmony, as human soul and body blend in each act of feeling, thought, or speech, so, as far as we can know, divinity and humanity act together in the thought and heart and act of the one Christ.
Archibald Alexander Hodge
#41. Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing ... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.
Harry Mathews
#42. No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.
James A. Garfield
#43. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.
Liu Xiaobo
#45. Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.
Jose Saramago
#46. Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed.
John Steinbeck
#47. His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.
J.M. Coetzee
#48. The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech.
Brian Acton
#49. Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]
Thomas I. Emerson
#50. The human species took a crucial step forward when its vocal musculature came under operant control in the production of speech sounds. Indeed, it is possible that all the distinctive achievements of the species can be traced to that one genetic change.
B.F. Skinner
#51. Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human...
Anita B. Sulser PhD
#52. To speak in a way that causes the other person to get disturbed is the greatest crime. On the contrary, if someone else speaks in that way, you should suppress it; that is considered a human.
Dada Bhagwan
#53. Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle
#54. If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.
W. Somerset Maugham
#55. It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on.
Floyd Abrams
#56. We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#57. Darwin speculated that "music tones and rhythms were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph" and that speech arose, secondarily, from this primal music.
Oliver Sacks
#58. Of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.
John Ruskin
#59. The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine Gordimer
#60. On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering
Frank X. Barron
#61. In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity's revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one.
Rudolf Steiner
#62. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech - and both are still dangerous to this day - but human beings would not be human without them.
Isaac Asimov
#63. Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.
Daniel J. Levitin
#64. John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster.
Graham Chapman
#65. To communicate is truly a gift. It is a wondrous ability of your amazing human body, the ability that allows us to connect with other humans to give meaning to our lives. I will argue that it is what makes us human.
Kathleen Depperschmidt
#66. There was nothing in all Douglas's powerful effort that appealed to the higher instincts of human nature, while Lincoln always touched sympathetic cords. Lincoln's speech excited and sustained the enthusiasm of his audience to the end.
Henry Villard
#67. Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.
James Earl Jones
#68. The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#69. 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
#70. The right to free speech is important but it isn't as important as 'we're all human beings together, let's find solutions together.'
Russell Brand
#71. It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation.
Adolf Hitler
#72. Speak Peace is a book that comes at an appropriate time when anger and violence dominates human attitudes. Marshall Rosenberg gives us the means to create peace through our speech and communication. A brilliant book.
Arun Manilal Gandhi
#73. Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point.
The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.
Aleister Crowley
#74. Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.
Mark Twain
#75. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
John Steinbeck
#76. Hutu extremists were able to incite genocide in Rwanda in part because years of propaganda had influenced Hutus to view Tutsis as less than human and so dangerous that they must be eliminated from the country.
Rachel Hilary Brown
#77. Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.
Alfred North Whitehead
#78. For pale and trembling anger rushes in
With faltering speech, and eyes that wildly stare,
Fierce as the tiger, madder than the seas,
Desperate and armed with more than human strength.
John Armstrong
#79. When doctrines divide and "isms" turn human against human, without speech, without silence, let us demonstrate. Let these demonstrations manifest everywhere. Not what we think or say but what we do shall avail - on with the dance.
Samuel L. Lewis
#80. Human was simultaneously the bearer of God's wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience.
N. T. Wright
#81. We're right to say that a culture that can't tolerate free speech is ... there are a wide range of positive human experiences that are not available in that culture. And we're right to want those experiences.
Sam Harris
#82. That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.
Tom Stoppard
#83. She started to speak, but then stopped. Anything she could think of to say seemed a mistake. In fact, speech in general seemed a mistake. It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work. from Back When We Were Grownups.
Anne Tyler
#84. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton ...
George Bernard Shaw
#85. It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.
We should do more of it.
David Bellos
#86. The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words.
A.W. Tozer
#87. Freedom of speech is, to all Americans, as oxygen is to the human condition. It is a right that has been irreversibly programmed into our hard drive. We are free to speak our minds. An artist's right to express him or herself as best suits their art, is the artist's prerogative and it is guaranteed.
John C. McGinley
#88. Remember, 'governance' is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis - it touches everything. It's everywhere, and that's why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners.
Vint Cerf
#89. It is absurd to hold that a man should be ashamed of an inability to defend himself with his limbs, but not ashamed of an inability to defend himself with speech and reason; for the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.
Aristotle.
#90. The aim is not to give human beings real goals that warrant belief, and tasks to share in, but to re-establish "belonging," although this kind of speech and thought is precisely calculated to avoid contact and so makes belonging impossible.
Paul Goodman
#91. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#92. The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.
Lev Vygotsky
#93. Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.
Martin Luther
#94. One feels 'the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible.
Ernest Shackleton
#95. Joe Biden will speak to the nation's largest gay rights group during a human rights convention on Friday. Then on Saturday, he is scheduled to speak to them again to apologize for whatever he said in Friday's speech.
Jimmy Fallon
#96. Maybe poets express more directly a sense of sympathy for other human beings. Painting is a little bit more of a retreat from human beings in real life; painting is more about the extreme moments when speech doesn't help anymore.
Francesco Clemente
#97. We are not going to always agree with each other, but we should have the dignity to always respect each other's freedom of speech and of choice. Democracy is practiced when we have respect for human rights.
Ellen J. Barrier
