Motivational Quotes

Speech

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.

- Mann, Thomas

Best Quotes about Speech

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. [Colossians 4:6]

Bible

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

Benjamin Disraeli

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

In a free state there should be freedom of speech and thought.

Tiberius

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

Hubbard, Kin

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

Cruise, Tom

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

I do know of these that... only are reputed wise for saying nothing.

William Shakespeare

10.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

11.

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

Mark Twain

12.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

13.

How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.

William Shakespeare

14.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

15.

Though thou speak'st truth, methink thou speak'st not well.

William Shakespeare

16.

I do not speak to thee in drink but in tears, not in pleasure but in passion, not in words only, but in woes also.

William Shakespeare

17.

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

18.

The mind is a wonderful thing. It starts working the minute you're born and never stops working until you get up to speak in public.

Ball, Patricia Ann

19.

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

William Shakespeare

20.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

21.

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

William Shakespeare

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Rorty, Richard

25.

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

William Shakespeare

26.

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

William Shakespeare

27.

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.

28.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

It's a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney?

Aitkins, Eileen

30.

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Paz, Octavio

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Thomas Carlyle

34.

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

Demosthenes

35.

Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

Wilder, Thornton

36.

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

37.

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

Hansell B. Duckett

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.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

Gore Vidal

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Speech is the gift of all, but the thought of few.

Cato The Elder

44.

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

Walter Bagehot

45.

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

46.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

47.

A long tongue shortens life.

48.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

49.

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

50.

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

Arendt, Hannah