Motivational Quotes

Speech

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Speech

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

Mark Twain

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

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

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

William Shakespeare

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

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

Mann, Thomas

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

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

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

Jefferson, Thomas

10.

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

11.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

12.

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

13.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon

14.

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice.

Raphael, Frederic

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

17.

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

18.

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

Noonan, Peggy

19.

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

Thomas Carlyle

20.

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

21.

A long tongue shortens life.

22.

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

Pythagoras

23.

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

24.

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

William Shakespeare

25.

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

26.

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

Moralia

27.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Proverb, Arabian

32.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

33.

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

Hesse, Hermann

34.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

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.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

38.

Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

Cioran, E. M.

39.

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

40.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

41.

Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.

Sophocles

42.

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

Chuang-tzu

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.

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

45.

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

Publilius Syrus

46.

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

Hansell B. Duckett

47.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

48.

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