Top 100 Quotes About Speaking Up
#1. It's very often the artist who gives a voice to the voiceless by speaking up when no one else will.
Barbra Streisand
#2. So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'
Tim Vine
#3. But no matter what happens, I spoke up, made a voice for myself, freed from the haunting memories that have owned me for the last six years. I found my courage.
Jessica Sorensen
#4. Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms.
Michael Chabon
#5. Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.
Lauren Oliver
#6. Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking
only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.
Daniel Alarcon
#7. [On refusing to be silenced:] I do not pretend to be John the Baptist rebuking the Pharisees. I do not claim to be Nathan upbraiding David. I aspire only to be Balaam's ass, castigating his master.
Katharina Zell
#8. The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?
John Rocker
#9. I wouldn't call it a silver lining, but with more women speaking up, online harassment is beginning to be taken more seriously.
Anita Sarkeesian
#10. Other people could stand up and speak to an assembly, apparently, without that dreadful feeling of pressure of personality; could say what they would as though they were speaking to only one person
William Golding
#11. More women speaking up and seizing the helm of power can create its own momentum. It can change the culture that helps perpetuate those external forces.
Nancy Birdsall
#12. Each mental act opens up a new dimension of actuality. In a manner of speaking, your slightest thought gives birth to worlds.
Jane Roberts
#13. I have one thing in common with the emerging black nations of Africa: We both have voices, and we are discovering what we can do with them.
Miriam Makeba
#14. Personally speaking, growing up as a gay man before it was as socially acceptable as it is now, I knew what it was to feel different, to feel alienated and to feel not like everyone else. But the very same thing that made me monstrous to some people also empowered me and made me who I was.
John Logan
#15. Speaking up is important. Yet to speak up without listening is like banging pots and pans together: Even if it gets you attention, it's not going to get you respect.
Gina Barreca
#16. In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image onto history.
Sheila Rowbotham
#17. Doc! I'd kiss you if you had a mouth, you sexy thing." Ro shouts up to the sky, as if Doc were everywhere in the universe. Which, sometimes, it feels like he is. "And I would exchange data with you if you had a dataport, you exemplary specimen. Analogically speaking. Is that correct?
Margaret Stohl
#18. I speak English. I grew up speaking Bengali. This is the normal, the known, the obvious composition of who I am. Then there's Italian, this strange, other component of me that I've just created. It was a creative process just to learn the language, never mind to start expressing myself in it.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#19. My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.
Ted Cruz
#20. Look, Sara. The way Andrew treated you was unconscionable. We all saw that, and I regret not speaking up on your behalf. But you have the choice to decide how you grow from it. If you're going to think every man is like him, you don't deserve Max. Max isn't that guy.
Christina Lauren
#21. I feel I must acknowledge that gay people are, generally speaking, funnier, more self-sufficient, and better in crises and I should step aside and let them handle the business whenever it comes up.
Thao Nguyen
#22. Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
Bai Juyi
#23. I'm from Michigan, but I'm just as country as anyone else. Maybe I don't have the speaking voice of most country singers, but it is what I love. It's how I've always sung, and it's what I grew up on.
Jana Kramer
#24. Let others know when they have hurt or angered you. By not speaking up when someone insults or mistreats you, you are inadvertently giving permission for him or her to continue to treat you in the same way in the future.
Beverly Engel
#25. To me, I don't think it does anybody any good to just hide something or cover it up or lie or whatever. I think ... that's what being a role model is all about. It's not about being perfect. It's about speaking about your issues and inspiring others to get help.
Demi Lovato
#26. [To the heckler who said, 'If you were my wife I'd poison you':] No, you wouldn't. I'd do it myself.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#27. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James
#28. I don't even know why I'm saying this in an interview situation, but I always feel like I'm not good enough for some reason. I wish that wasn't the case, but left to my own devices, that voice starts speaking up.
Trent Reznor
#29. I do try to say, God's will be done, sir," said the Squire, looking up at Mr. Gibson for the first time, and speaking with more life in his voice; "but it's harder to be resigned than happy people think.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#30. Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.
G.K. Chesterton
#31. I give up. Stop speaking, responding, refuse food and
water. They can pump whatever they want into my arm, but
it takes more than that to keep a person going once she's
lost the will to live.
Suzanne Collins
#32. So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.
Jim Hightower
#33. Thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
Hannah Arendt
#34. You are worthy of love, and success, and your dreams coming true. Never stop speaking, even when your voice begins to shake, okay? Never give up on yourself. You are important, you are loved, and your beautiful voice matters.
Brittainy C. Cherry
#35. Why is an actor's unintentional giggling called a 'corpse'? It seems to me quite the opposite. It proves that he's very much alive, and can still tell how silly this all is: him dressed up as someone else speaking words written by a third party.
Antony Sher
#36. I've learned the importance of speaking up for myself and voicing my opinions and my ideas. I'm definitely a shy person.
Fiona Gubelmann
#37. When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
Sonia Sotomayor
#38. This is your captain speaking. Welcome aboard flight ... one, from ... here to there. We'll be cruising at a height of ten feet, going up to twelve and a half feet if we see anything big. And our copilot today is a flask of coffee.
Eddie Izzard
#39. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.
Sebastian Arcelus
#40. I use a different style if I'm speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up folks pretty well. But when I'm in these town hall settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat. I want to give them a sense of my thought process.
Barack Obama
#41. No. See, when you throw up you're vomiting, but when you throw down you're starting a fight, as in throwing down the gauntlet."
"Ohhhh," he said. "I thought you were speaking literally."
"I do beg your pardon. Let's literally throw up, but figuratively throw down.
Kevin Hearne
#42. Did you know that smiling politely burns up the same amount of calories as speaking your mind.
Colson Whitehead
#43. I didn't grow up speaking Spanish, and the interesting thing was, we would watch these novelas and you didn't have to speak Spanish to understand what was going on.
Eva Longoria
#44. We women are going to bring change. We are speaking up for girls' rights, but we must not behave like men, like they have done in the past.
Malala Yousafzai
#45. I sigh and sit back up on the couch. "Hey, Mom." I'm really surprised she's speaking to me. It's only been one day since the funeral. That's 364 days sooner than I expected to hear from her.
Colleen Hoover
#46. Ultimately when I gave up the use of motorized vehicles, I walked everywhere, from town to town, across states and two continents. When I stopped talking, I mean literally I stopped speaking. I took a complete vow of silence.
John Francis
#47. As a wolf, I'm a diamond in the rough. I crack jokes. My whole life is about trying, about speaking up in order to be seen, about howling with laughter or howling out how I see the world.
Jessi Klein
#48. Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory--speaking at the highest level--of how scandalously, how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it.
J.M. Coetzee
#50. Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and, generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school.
George Mikes
#51. You should also have a bio that plays up your brand - this will be used for any kind of press or speaking engagement. Make it jazzy and exciting, and don't be afraid of language that really touts you.
Kate White
#53. Metaphorically speaking, of course, if I put a problem behind my pillow and fall asleep, very often because my brain went to sleep with that idea or the problem alive, very often in the middle of the night I wake up, and I wake up with a solution or with a direction of solution.
Philippe Petit
#54. We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world may no longer be to write a letter to the editor or publish a book. It may be simply to stand up and say something ... because both the words and the passion with which they are delivered can now spread across the world at warp speed.
Chris Anderson
#55. Madam," he said, speaking very softly into her face. "I do not want your money. My wife does not want it. And my son will not have it. Cram it up your hole, aye?
Diana Gabaldon
#56. Stigma's power lies in silence. The silence that persists when discussion and action should be taking place. The silence one imposes on another for speaking up on a taboo subject, branding them with a label until they are rendered mute or preferably unheard.
M.B. Dallocchio
#57. There are lots of actors who insist on speaking the lines themselves, and you hear the same thing from directors and the audience, but I don't think it's worth getting het up about. I think it makes more sense to use someone who speaks that country's language: that's what voice actors are for.
Tadanobu Asano
#58. Women speaking up for themselves and for those around them is the strongest force we have to change the world.
Melinda Gates
#59. I have certainly heard of the Subtle Art of Shutting Up, but I can't say I've practiced it all that much. I greatly prefer the underappreciated genius of Speaking My Mind. I figure if someone doesn't like what I have to say, they shouldn't put their ears in close proximity to my mouth.
Jenny Lundquist
#60. I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I grew up moving from country to country due to political, governmental, and social issues and just family atmosphere that wasn't right to bring up your kid in a country where there's a dictatorship or a communist type sense, so I incorporate that int music.
Cristian Machado
#61. I am strong and human with a mouth that works like a man's and a more intelligible brain, and I demand to be heard.
Caroline George
#62. Wherever you find a wife and mother-in-law slugging it out, you'll find a son who's not speaking up to either his mother or his wife.
Harriet Lerner
#63. If anyone who speaks up to criticise something obviously evil is punished merely for speaking, civilisation will be in a bad way.
Ann Leckie
#64. Spiritually speaking, here's an important analogy: we're not accountable for how our accomplishments measure up to the gifted person sitting next to us. However, we are accountable for what we do with what we've been given.
Susie Larson
#65. Listen should be on 60-70% and talking or speaking on from 40 up to 30%.
Deyth Banger
#66. By not speaking you don't get rid of the story, you just open up a silence, which can be just as loud.
Matt Smith
#67. Be a teacher. If someone is acting hurtful toward you, chances are high that they're doing the same to others. By speaking up and taking action, you are helping others who might be hurt from this person unless they are reigned in.
Doreen Virtue
#68. Being a songwriter or a painter you're definitely facing your fears. You're facing your fears because you're speaking your truth; you're speaking from your heart. That's something that's not easy to do, you set yourself up for all sorts of criticism or vulnerability but that's why we do it.
Brett Dennen
#69. Sometimes she woke up speaking his name.
Sometimes she wondered how it were possible to be so far from the sea and still feel as if she were drowning.
Jojo Moyes
#70. I think the world's a little smaller these days. With the Internet and the availability of people, the pool of English speaking actors - not just American actors, but Brits, Australians, New Zealanders, Irish. We're all up for grabs.
Sonya Walger
#72. I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.
Michael Cunningham
#73. I grew up in New York in an English-speaking environment.
Erik Estrada
#74. Do you call that a head on your shoulders, or a blessed dead-eye?" cried Long John. "Don't rightly know, don't you! Perhaps you don't happen to rightly know who you was speaking to, perhaps? Come, now, what was he jawing - v'yages, cap'ns, ships? Pipe up! What was it?" "We
Robert Louis Stevenson
#75. This heavenly language opens up a door into the Father's presence, which is the only place where we can receive deep revelations right from His mouth.
Sunday Adelaja
#77. He felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet ... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo ... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?
Agatha Christie
#78. I say it, and even speaking such a dream is to offer it up for taint. As long as it is secret, closed, full of blood, it is inviolable. Now I've presented it for piercing. Mitchell
Deborah Meyler
#79. It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.
James Elkins
#80. Furi pulled back and looked at him with complete solemnity before speaking in a rough voice, "You have me worked up ... you. You make me fuckin' crazy. That shit you did tonight was reckless. You had me scared shitless for a while." Furi
A.E. Via
#81. As a kid growing up, this was sometimes a little bit intimidating to have a mom who was always, like, speaking up and always saying something that might be kind of controversial ... The thing I think that we got out of that that was really good was, like, we weren't afraid to make waves.
Susan Wojcicki
#82. The price for standing up for Truth, no matter how severe, will always be less than the price our souls will be penalized for not speaking up for our conscience. There is no greater crime in the universe than silencing your conscience.
Suzy Kassem
#83. I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids' dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We've all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.
Dwayne Johnson
#84. When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
J.M.G. Le Clezio
#85. Every story was being made up. My true friends weren't the ones speaking. It was people who never knew me, making up stories. Even my local paper put a $1,000 bounty out for information about my whereabouts.
Marla Maples
#86. All I could think as he was speaking was that, if he touched me at all, all the miles I'd walked, the pain I'd felt, the beauty I'd drunken like milk, like good wine making me happy, the four million steps I'd taken, would all add up to nothing. They'd be stolen.
Aspen Matis
#87. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.
Ann Patchett
#88. I didn't grow up around my father. I didn't really grow up around my mother, either. I was raised by a community of people. Spiritually speaking, my father is in Heaven, and that is who I look to for all my answers. And that's why my faith is very strong and why my passion is strong.
Troy Polamalu
#89. The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
Steven Pinker
#90. Public speaking is scary, I think. I've gotten way better at it. If I have to do a speech and be like, 'I'm a YouTuber,' then that's easy, but if I have to get up there and pretend I know something in front of adults, it's never fine. In front of adults, it's like, 'Ahhhh they're going to judge me.'
Connor Franta
#91. I'm married to Senator Vincent Hughes of Pennsylvania, so I always am speaking my mind. I remember, growing up, my parents were always involved in what was going on in the community, and their involvement helped me in so many different ways and other people within our community.
Sheryl Lee Ralph
#92. I had the honor of speaking with Asimov. The album ended up being something not directly related to Asimov, but related instead to the concept of the power of robotics.
Alan Parsons
#93. He actually came up to me and we started speaking. And from that conversation we were able to come to a meeting of the minds and it seemed as if it was clear to me that he wanted to do similar things to what I wanted to do.
Maurice Ashley
#94. The dead" we say as if speaking
of "the people" who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and null groan
without echo underground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
Adrienne Rich
#95. Don't make it necessary for me to complain about you to Christ crucified. (There is no one else I can complain to, since there is no one greater than you on earth.
St. Catherine Of Siena
#96. I take a deep breath and sidestep my fear and begin speaking from the place where beauty and bravery meet
within the chambers of a quivering heart.
Terry Tempest Williams
#98. Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.
Clint Eastwood
#99. The single hardest part of leading any organization is knowing what is going on. There's too much noise in the system, too much complexity: you absolutely depend on people speaking up and raising concerns.
Margaret Heffernan
#100. You must cry out if you want help. It is no use whatsoever to suffer in silence. Who will succour the drowning man if he does not clamour for his life?
Kamala Markandaya
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