Top 100 Quotes About Speech
#1. A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.
Brendan Behan
#3. In the secret island the Druid shall dwell once more, and the Bard, the slave of the harp, utter the speech of the Gods.
Lewis Spence
#4. Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.
Richard Stallman
#5. Let us always remember that he does not really believe his own opinion, who dares not give free scope to his opponent.
Wendell Phillips
#6. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.
Jesse Kellerman
#7. While I've found many of the religious shows I've viewed over the years not to be to my liking, or in line with my own beliefs, I've never considered it my place to exert any greater type of censorship than changing the channel, or better yet - turning off the TV completely.
Bill Hicks
#8. The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.
Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
#9. Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.
Frederick Douglass
#10. They've got this crazy actor who's 82 years old up there in a suit. I was a mayor, and they're probably thinking I know how to give a speech, but even when I was mayor I never gave speeches. I gave talks.
Clint Eastwood
#11. Of silence, I can say only what I have heard, that all things are known by that which they make or leave
and so speech isn't itself, but its effect, and silence is the same.
Jesse Ball
#13. Cadence, n.
I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Suthern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you penetrate my very language.
David Levithan
#14. When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.
Thomas Szasz
#15. He whose speech, behavior and humility captivates people's minds, becomes worthy of worship by people.
Dada Bhagwan
#16. My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.
Bob Sheppard
#17. The person who abides in solitude and quiet is delivered from fighting three battles: hearing, speech, and sight. Then there remains one battle to fight-the battle of the heart.
Anthony The Great
#18. Nobody should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become a totalitarian state - the kind of state I escaped as a kid to come to this country where you have democracy and freedom of speech.
Jan Koum
#19. The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.
H.L. Mencken
#20. More than ever at that instant did she long for speech - speech that would conceal and protect where dangerous silence might betray.
L.M. Montgomery
#21. In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer ... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.
John Leo
#22. Free speech is the cornerstone to every right we have.
Mark Thomas
#23. I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.
Peggy Noonan
#24. It is without doubt that freedoms of the press and speech need to be protected, but there are undisputed limits to these freedoms, limits that often come into play when national security is threatened.
Charles B. Rangel
#25. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.
Henry Adams
#26. A speech is like an airplane engine. It may sound like hell but you've got to go on.
William T. Piper
#27. You don't need speech or hearing to feel [friendship]
Mitch Albom
#29. Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it - which always amounts to the same.
Jacques Derrida
#30. I must do whatever I can to find the best partners possible."
"Did you kick their butts?"
He frowned. "The buttocks are among the least sensitive places to hit someone."
I laughed. "It's a figure of speech."
"To kick butts. Interesting.
Allison Van Diepen
#31. Man is born to dream, to be enlightened, to connect and to be fulfilled. Managers are too.
Stan Slap
#32. The fact that we're protected under that Constitution in exercising the right of free speech, it's a wonderful thing. You've got to come from somewhere else to realize how valuable it is.
Pat Oliphant
#33. A mediocre speech supported by all the power of delivery will be more impressive than the best speech unaccompanied by such power.
Quintilian
#34. When Minutemen leader Jim Gilchrist and his black colleague Marvin Stewart were invited by the College Republicans to speak at Columbia last year, the tolerant, free-speech-loving Columbia students violently attacked them, shutting down the speech.
Ann Coulter
#35. I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.
Brian Helgeland
#36. He'd listened to enough half-truths and outright lies from the outlaws he'd collected bounties on not to notice the slight hesitations in her speech or the exaggerated casualness of her posture. The woman was up to something. Heeding
Karen Witemeyer
#37. Ohio Governor John Kasich became the 16th Republican to announce that he is running for president. During his speech he referred to Jesus Christ, which is ironic because so did Americans when they heard another Republican was running for president.
Jimmy Fallon
#39. Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.
Leonard Mlodinow
#40. The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic.
Sigmund Freud
#41. Privacy is not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution as freedom of speech is in the First Amendment.
Larry Flynt
#42. If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]
George Orwell
#43. Probably no other country in the 1920s - certainly not the United States, with its stark repression of the Left, vicious antiunion policies, and legally enshrined racism - had so wide a range of free speech, such a vital public sphere, as Germany.
Eric D. Weitz
#44. Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.
Carl L. Becker
#46. Lovers cannot imagine any opposition, no matter how small, to the beloved. They cannot endure to see the beloved veiled by something that causes Him to be forgotten. Moreover, lovers regard as futile any speech not about the beloved, and any act not related to Him as ingratitude and disloyalty.
Fethullah Gulen
#47. Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.
Charles Stross
#48. Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.
Denis Leary
#49. Experience is beyond knowledge, words and speech.
It is experience which shows us the real meaning of life.
Gian Kumar
#50. I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.
Stephen Colbert
#51. Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.
David Frum
#52. Slow down, especially at the beginning of a speech. You'll get the audience's attention by pausing.
Bob Kerrey
#54. Oh! here we are the same as anywhere else, when you get to know us,' observed Mrs. Dean, somewhat puzzled at my speech.
Emily Bronte
#55. First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
Peter Ellis
#56. This can't be constitutional," he said. "This is America, damn it. We still have freedom of speech here.
Bentley Little
#57. Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.
John Galsworthy
#58. Political leaders normally act by making convincing speeches.
Helmut Schmidt
#59. I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless. But his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.
Candice Bergen
#60. Aristotle warned that inequality brought instability, while Plato believed that demagogues exploited free speech to install themselves as tyrants.
Timothy Snyder
#61. The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.
Henry David Thoreau
#62. I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! ... I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk.
Alexander Graham Bell
#63. Let no one ever think for a moment that national debate means national division.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#64. We need a constitutional amendment to allow the legislature to control the so-called free speech rights of corporations.
Hank Johnson
#65. Lily," Mom said, "we need to talk."
I don't think I'm ruining the surprise by pointing out that nothing good happens when someone starts a speech like that.
Chloe Neill
#67. Having been heavily involved in the planning of a couple of G.O.P. conventions, my view is, we should just scrap 'em. Cancel 'em. Just figure out an appropriate forum for the nominee to give an acceptance speech and be done with it.
Mark McKinnon
#68. James Joyce seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived, had both his eyes wide open and great faculty of speech, but what he say, I knew not what.
Bob Dylan
#69. He that negotiates between God and man, As God's ambassador, the grand concerns Of judgment and of mercy, should beware Of lightness in his speech.
William Cowper
#70. Creation discloses a power that baffles our minds and beggars our speech. We are enamored and enchanted by God's power. We stutter and stammer about God's holiness. We tremble before God's majesty ...
and yet, we grow squeamish and skittish before God's love.
Brennan Manning
#71. I think that, as Americans, we should never forget that when we tamper with freedom of speech, it is a very sensitive issue that affects all of our constitutional rights and privileges.
Charles B. Rangel
#72. It's not that we're supposed to enjoy it; it's that we're supposed to allow it and then respond in a more persuasive voice. That's the bedrock of the First Amendment - the answer to speech you do not like is not less speech, it's more speech. In
Megyn Kelly
#73. We should say nothing that we would not wish to say in His Presence. We should do nothing that we would not do in His Presence.
Billy Graham
#74. I wish there is a world where any one can know the truth and speak there mind with freedom without having to fear for their lives (Rinko, Basara, Vol. 13)
Yumi Tamura
#75. Words cannot only be made ... But made to have a meaning, free the tongue and continue your speech.
Michael Bassey Johnson
#76. Whatever doubt there may be as to the quality or purpose of our free speech we certainly have ample volumes in production.
Herbert Hoover
#77. Watson, ... if I can get a mechanism which will make a current of electricity vary in its intensity, as the air varies in density when a sound is passing through it, I can telegraph any sound, even the sound of speech.
Alexander Graham Bell
#78. Speak simple, speak plain, speak clear, otherwise you may not be understood! The objective of a speech is to be understood! Let your message be obvious, as obvious as the message of the wind for the sailboat!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#80. Free speech is a restraint on government; not an incitement to the citizen.
David McCullough
#81. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#82. I do not see emotions and feelings as the intangible and vaporous qualities that many presume them to be. Their subject matter is concrete, and they can be related to specific systems in body and brain, no less so than vision or speech.
Antonio R. Damasio
#83. He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.
William Howard Taft
#84. Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,
a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.
Henry David Thoreau
#85. For the introvert, conversation can be a very limited forum for self-expression. When a song moves you, a writer "gets" you, or a theory enlightens you - you and its creator are connecting in a realm beyond sight or speech.
Laurie A. Helgoe
#86. "Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standig on a street corner and shouting "There is no freedom here!
Yoani Sanchez
#87. Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God's essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?
Reza Aslan
#88. Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics ... derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates.
Benjamin Franklin
#89. The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.
Confucius
#90. Satire dramatizes better than any other use of it, the inherent contradiction of free speech that it functions best when what is being said is at its most outrageous.
Tony Hendra
#91. 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
#92. Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
Jacques Barzun
#93. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
#94. In speech after speech on his health care plan, the President has tried to convince us that what he is proposing will be good for America. But, how can it be good for America if it raises taxes by a half trillion dollars and costs a trillion dollars or more to implement?
Scott Brown
#95. During a campaign speech in Ohio, President Obama said, 'I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth'. So to be fair, he wants to take your silverware and spread it around.
Fred Thompson
#97. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot
#98. All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.
Elbert Hubbard
#99. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.
James Frey
#100. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.
Salman Rushdie
