Motivational Quotes

Speech

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.

Best Quotes about Speech

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.

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

Arendt, Hannah

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

Cioran, E. M.

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

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

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

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

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

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

Chuang-tzu

10.

Men of few words are the best men.

William Shakespeare

11.

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

Thomas Carlyle

12.

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

13.

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

Sir William Osler

14.

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

Cato The Elder

15.

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

Hansell B. Duckett

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Tears at times have all the weight of speech.

Ovid

19.

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

William Shakespeare

20.

Speech is the mirror of the mind. (Imago Animi Sermo Est)

Seneca

21.

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

22.

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

23.

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

Mann, Thomas

24.

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

Talleyrand, Charles Maurice De

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Publilius Syrus

28.

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

Walter Bagehot

29.

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

30.

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

Proverb, Arabian

31.

Better pointed bullets than pointed speeches.

Bismarck, Otto Von

32.

A long tongue shortens life.

33.

Free speech carries with it some freedom to listen.

Bob Marley

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Speech is always bolder than action.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

38.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

39.

Weighest thy words before thou givest them breath.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

Demosthenes

41.

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

William Shakespeare

42.

We have as many planes of speech as does a painting planes of perspective which create perspective in a phrase. The most important word stands out most vividly defined in the very foreground of the sound plane. Less important words create a series of deeper planes.

Stanislavisky, Konstantin

43.

Thought is the fountain of speech.

Chrysippus

44.

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

45.

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

Cruise, Tom

46.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

47.

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

William Shakespeare

48.

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