Motivational Quotes

Speech

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

- Stevenson, Robert Louis

Best Quotes about Speech

Speeches are not magic and there is no great speech without great policy.

Noonan, Peggy

A talk is like a woman's dress. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting.

Bore: one who has the power of speech but not the capacity for conversation.

Benjamin Disraeli

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.

Simmons, Charles

Be check'd for silence, but never tax'd for speech.

William Shakespeare

Speech is a mirror of the soul: as a man speaks, so is he.

Publilius Syrus

Do not fight verbosity with words: speech is given to all, intelligence to few.

Moralia

It's better to keep your mouth shut and give the impression that you're stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

Belson, Rami

10.

What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to.

Hansell B. Duckett

11.

I've decided to discontinue my long talks. It's because of my throat. Someone threatened to cut it.

12.

For mankind, speech with a capital S is especially meaningful and committing, more than the content communicated. The outcry of the newborn and the sound of the bells are fraught with mystery more than the baby's woeful face or the venerable tower.

Goodman, Paul

13.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

14.

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.

Barthes, Roland

15.

Sweet Benjamin, since thou art young, and hast not yet the use of tongue, make it thy slave, while thou art free; Imprison it, lest it do thee.

Hoskins, John

16.

What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.

Maugham, W. Somerset

17.

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

Pythagoras

18.

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.

Walter Bagehot

19.

Why doesn't the fellow who says, I'm no speechmaker let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?

Hubbard, Kin

20.

Listening to someone talk isn't at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.

Fallaci, Oriana

21.

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.

Campbell, Patrick

22.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.

Syrus, Publilius

23.

Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought.

Sir William Osler

24.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

25.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

26.

When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you. When it is unspoken you reign over it.

Proverb, Arabian

27.

Talk is over-rated as a means of settling disputes.

Cruise, Tom

28.

Be a craftsman in speech that thou mayest be strong, for the strength of one is the tongue, and speech is mightier than all fighting.

Maxims of Ptahhotep

29.

Talkers are no good doers; be assur'd we come to use our hands and not our tongues.

William Shakespeare

30.

The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly --because if they don't speak fast nobody will listen to them.

Caine, Michael

31.

Let us speak, though we show all our faults and weaknesses, --for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it -- not in a set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation.

Melville, Herman

32.

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

Connolly, Cyril

33.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

34.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

35.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

36.

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Whitehead, Alfred North

37.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Mark Twain

38.

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.

W. Somerset Maugham

39.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

William Shakespeare

41.

If you don't want to read it, see it or hear it, don't say it.

42.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

43.

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

44.

A long tongue shortens life.

45.

All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action.

Demosthenes

46.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

47.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

48.

Never try to impress people with the profundity of your thought by the obscurity of your language. Whatever has been thoroughly thought through can be stated simply.

49.

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

Arendt, Hannah

50.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

Thomas Carlyle