Top 100 Speak For The Quotes
#1. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#2. Well, Australians should speak for the national interests of Australia, and whatever role former Australian prime ministers may have, one of the things you do is speak frankly about the country as you see the country's best interests, you know?
Paul Keating
#4. And as cynical and jaded as many have become, you see the heroic nature of cops, who put aside a lot of their own personal concerns and their families to speak for the dead, which is a sacred thing. Over time there is this thing in them that is very powerful and interesting and provocative to me.
Veena Sud
#5. I'll speak for the man, or against him, whichever will do him the most good.
Richard M. Nixon
#6. I told (God) I'd take every opportunity to speak for the kids who can't speak,
Lauren Conrad
#7. In many ways when Jerry Ford pardoned Nixon, in a certain way, he did speak for the country.
Morley Safer
#8. Democrats may be in the minority in Congress, but we speak for the majority of Americans.
Edward Kennedy
#9. I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.
Dave Barry
#10. The despicable crone known as Mombi stands accused of high witchery, gross dishonesty, untold crimes against monkeys, outrageous trespassing, and general unpleasantness. Also, she is extremely unattractive. Miss Amy, do you speak for the witch?
Danielle Paige
#11. The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal.
Stephen D. Krashen
#12. We speak for the entire Giants organization when we say that there is no place in society for hatred and bullying against anyone.
Barry Zito
#13. Rap is supposed to be about keeping it real and not relinquishing your roots in the community. Without that, it's just posturing. Somebody who claims to speak for the 'hood don't need no private jet.
Chuck D
#14. There is something mournful and uneasy about waking up late at night on a moving train. The wheels clicked a bony rhythm, the engine growled like a distant Leviathan, and from time to time the whistle sounded a cry so lonesome it seemed to speak for the whole wide moonless night.
Robert Charles Wilson
#15. At town meetings, you can see the shy folks, the ones who have trouble sounding off in public, leaning against the back wall or bending over their knitting. On talk radio, those people are invisible, but they're there. It's a mistake to think that the blowhards who call in speak for the nation.
Donella Meadows
#16. I am above eighty years old ... I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.
Sojourner Truth
#17. I can't speak for the other authors, but what I hoped to achieve was to illuminate certain corners of the Lucas universe that hadn't yet been explored.
Walter Jon Williams
#18. An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community must speak in the tone of that community.
Stokely Carmichael
#19. You're Catholic, right? What do the Catholics say?"
Nico lifted an eyebrow and regarded Sandra with sparkly eyes. "I'm not the Lorax of Catholics. I don't speak for the trees of the faithful. That's why we have the Pope.
Penny Reid
#20. Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers.
Camille Paglia
#21. Edmund Burke once described society as a partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn. It is difficult to see in the evolving system who will speak for the yet unborn, for the future.
Fareed Zakaria
#22. I can't speak for the future. I have no crystal ball.
Michael Jordan
#23. [Y]ou are ... entrusted with the pursuit of that most extraordinary of crimes: the theft of a human life. You speak for the dead. You avenge those lost to the world.
David Simon
#24. My daddy tried to get me up to speak for the 17 years that I worked behind the scenes, but I never had the desire. Naturally, I was nervous and kind of shy. I just didn't want to do it.
Joel Osteen
#25. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#26. I'm not one of those people who wake up chatting. I usually don't want to speak for the first 10 or 20 minutes. And I don't really want you to talk to me either!
Queen Latifah
#27. Mr. President, I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American. I speak for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause.
Daniel Webster
#28. I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.
Anna Julia Cooper
#29. It is no merit in the sorrowful that they weep, or to the oppressed and smothering that they gasp and struggle, not to me, that I must speak for the oppressed - who cannot speak for themselves.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#30. They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.
James Russell Lowell
#32. I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.
Lucy Stone
#33. There were so many who did wish to speak. For the movement was without scruples; she rolled towards her goal unconcernedly and deposed the corpses of the drowned in the windings of her course.
Anonymous
#34. No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.
Mary Karr
#35. I think I speak for the guy who is just s a regular guy who says yo I don't wanna go to an expensive restaurant.
Kool Keith
#36. I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues.
Dr. Seuss
#37. You can't speak for the people unless you're able to walk amongst the people. And how many of these rappers out here actually hang out with regular people?
DMX
#38. I'm not a policy maker. I'm not even a very great activist. My main thing is to make things that speak for the culture that I live in.
Wangechi Mutu
#39. It can not be done; it shall not be done! I speak for the great masses of the Mississippi Valley, and those west of it, when I say you shall not do it!
Richard Parks Bland
#41. It is taken care of. Nothing will not break into my Pit or the Far Reaches! I cannot speak for the other parts of the House, but we have Nothing well in hand here. I understand Nothing as no one else does!
- Grim Tuesday
Garth Nix
#42. When we speak for the poor, please note that we do not take sides with one social class. What we do is invite all social classes, rich and poor, without distinction, saying to everyone let us take seriously the cause of the poor as though it were our own.
Oscar Romero
#43. Bettman is an asshole. A frikkin asshole. I think he's ruined the game of hockey. He's supposed to be impartial. He's supposed to speak for the good of the league, but in my opinion, he's strictly behind the owners. Those 1996 rule changes are a joke
Bob Probert
#44. A lot of them [Germaqn actors] could come in and we could speak for the next nine hours in English and there would be no problem. It was - but it was - English wasn't the language for them to read poetry in. And there is a - there's a poetic quality to my dialogue.
Quentin Tarantino
#45. Glenn Beck retired or got fired ... and a lot of people are asking who will now speak for the raving lunatics who startle you outside of a parking garage?
Bill Maher
#46. I'm quite shocked and have been for quite a while as for the way people are treating each other. That's why I go out and I speak for the hungry, and if I see somebody needs a hug during the day, I'll go and give them a hug, and I think we should all use a little bit more of that.
Kelly LeBrock
#47. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Elie Wiesel
#48. I can't speak for the other people whose children have died, but I can speak for my family and the other members of Gold Star Families for Peace. We believe we're honoring our children by working for peace.
Cindy Sheehan
#49. The dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other
W.S. Merwin
#50. I can't speak for the Kathryn Stockett, but I would guess that she feels proud of the progress the South has made because, growing up, she experienced a very different Mississippi than the one that exists today.
Viola Davis
#51. I stood there, 220 pounds of ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, leaning against the faded walnut rail of the witness stand, home to a million sweaty palms. "To Speak for the Dead" (The Jake Lassiter Series)
Paul Levine
#52. Life's true value and meaning can only be known if we speak for the truth, not for our advocacy, but for the truth itself.
Kasey Collin P. Dumdum
#53. I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.
C.L.R. James
#54. I decided to become a policeman to speak for the dead. They have no one else, you see. Somewhere there's always proof of what happened, some piece of evidence that will obtain a conviction. It's important for the guilty to be brought to justice, I think. Without justice, there's chaos.
Charles Todd
#55. I can't really speak for the guys, but for me, I think I want a build a longer-term career and I feel like we've been really fortunate to have some big success with a few things, but I want smaller success with more things.
Isaac Slade
#56. I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream.
Mark Strand
#57. Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!
Charlotte Bronte
#58. The advantage of working for a corporation is that it has only one message, because a product or a service doesn't speak; it's just there, and you can advertise it.
Frank Luntz
#59. I don't believe in the so-called Olympic spirit. I speak from personal experience. When China hosted the Games, it failed to include the people. The event was constructed without regard for their joy.
Ai Weiwei
#60. The emptinesss was a hole that only he could fill. He was the relief. It pulled from every direction, this yearning for him. All he needed to do was speak the words, "Kiss me," and I would obey.
Jessica Therrien
#61. I always have the feeling we are merely fearfully trying to save room for God; I would rather speak of God at the center than at the limits, in strength rather than weakness, and thus in human life and goodness rather than in death and guilt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#62. Obama wanted to offer his support to birth control activist Sandra Fluke. He wanted to express his disappointment that she has been the subject of inappropriate personal attacks and thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on an issue of public policy.
Jay Carney
#63. I've never had to spend any time in the VA hospital, so I really can't speak for those guys.
R. Lee Ermey
#64. One may discover a new side to his most intimate friend when for the first time he hears him speak in public. He will be stranger to him as he is more familiar to the audience. The longest intimacy could not foretell how he would behave then
Henry David Thoreau
#65. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#66. Mind your business. Take care of what you came here for. Find the 'I' first and you may afterwards speak of other matters.
Ramana Maharshi
#67. It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.
Soren Kierkegaard
#68. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#69. The disappointed one speaks. I searched for great human beings; I always found only the apes of their ideals.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#70. You sometimes speak of gravity as essential and inherent to matter. Pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know, and therefore would take more time to consider of it.
Isaac Newton
#71. I can only speak for myself, but when I was growing up in Memphis - and having the Martin Luther King holiday and the moment of pause on April 4th - he was just a statue to me. I wanted to make him a little bit more real to me as a human being.
Katori Hall
#72. If, like Harry Keogh, I could talk to the dead - God, there are an awful lot of people I would like to speak to! Not least my father. Being in the army for 22 years, I didn't see enough of him, and I know there are a great many things I could have learned from him.
Brian Lumley
#73. When I speak of Team India I believe that the foundation for India's development will not be the single pillar of the Central Government, but 30 pillars comprising the Central Government and all our States.
Narendra Modi
#74. I like being free to take on any project that inspires me and to trust that the work will speak for itself.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw
#75. Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.
Nick Cave
#76. Sex is pretty much our most important job. It's the one thing we have to nail - so to speak - so we get invited back for more. It's pretty much the reason we take a shower and brush our hair.
Rachel Gibson
#77. Bonhoeffer's rule never to speak about a brother in his absence. Bonhoeffer knew that living according to what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount was not "natural" for anyone.
Eric Metaxas
#78. In Psalm 72, Solomon prays for power and fame but he says the purpose of influence is to speak up for others and one is the immigrant. He doesn't delineate between legal and illegal.
Rick Warren
#79. The larger the German body, the smaller the German bathing suit and the louder the German voice issuing German demands and German orders to everybody who doesn't speak German. For this, and several other reasons, Germany is known as 'the land where Israelis learned their manners'.
P. J. O'Rourke
#80. Confidentially, the type of male I find most enjoyable for a friend is one who has enough fire and assurance to speak up for his convictions.
Marilyn Monroe
#81. There is a story I always tell my students ... when I came for the 1st time to the US. I didn't speak English (Only Spanish) & I saw on every door the word "exit" which in Spanish means Success = Exito. And then I said :"No wonder Americans are winners ,every door they open leads to success
Pablo
#82. It is not courage that makes us speak the truth, but it is a hunger for truth that makes us courageous
Agona Apell
#83. The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.
Milton Friedman
#84. I hate your reasons. I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say - pain is a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak ... Yes. At the end of a gun.
Graham Greene
#85. For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages.
Jakob Bohme
#86. The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.
Frederick Douglass
#87. There is no real need for decorations when throwing a barbecue party - let the summer garden, in all its vibrant and luscious splendour, speak for itself.
Pippa Middleton
#88. Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
J.M. Barrie
#89. If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#90. She doesn't speak, and I say nothing more. We just stare at each other, letting the tears roll down our cheeks. That's what tears are for, after all. A way for the soul to bleed.
Cody McFadyen
#91. Somethin' like four thousand bottles have been thrown at me in my day but only about twenty ever hit me. That does not speak very well for the accuracy of the fans' throwing.
Harry Gordon Johnson
#92. 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
#93. Whether we speak of the death to self or a sinking down in humility and meekness before God or faith in the Lamb of God, it all means one thing - a deliverance from self to find our liberty and our blessedness in the living sacrifice of ourselves for all around us. THE END
Andrew Murray
#94. 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
#95. When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot.
John Constable
#96. When two people have been married for years they seem to become unconscious of each other's bodily presence so that they move as if alone, speak aloud things which they do not expect to be answered, and in general seem to experience all the comfort of solitude without its loneliness.
Virginia Woolf
#97. ...theology waits as it works. It waits for its lungs again to be filled. Without the renewing breath of the Spirit it cannot speak.
Craig Keen
#98. Mothers ought to bring up and nurse their own children; for they bring them up with greater affection and with greater anxiety, as loving them from the heart, and so to speak, every inch of them.
Plutarch
#99. I will ask questions that are so wide and open they will feel the need to speak for a week. Then from the information that they give to me, I will mould solutions designed specifically for them.
Chris Murray
#100. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.
Ken Liu
