Motivational Quotes

Speech

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

- Whitehead, Alfred North

Best Quotes about Speech

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

In anger we should refrain both from speech and action.

Pythagoras

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.

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

Raphael, Frederic

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

Mark Twain

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

Demosthenes

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

Cioran, E. M.

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

William Shakespeare

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

Hansell B. Duckett

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Benjamin Disraeli

15.

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

William Shakespeare

16.

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

17.

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

Moralia

18.

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

William Shakespeare

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Mann, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Cato The Elder

25.

They that are loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. It is probable that he who is killed by lightning hears no noise; but the thunder-clap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety.

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis

29.

Readiness of speech is often inability to hold the tongue.

Jean Baptiste Rousseau

30.

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

31.

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

Thomas Carlyle

32.

Things are often spoke and seldom meant.

William Shakespeare

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

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

Cruise, Tom

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.

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

Tiberius

38.

Where the speech is corrupted, the mind is also.

Seneca

39.

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

Hesse, Hermann

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

43.

Be it art or hap, he hath spoken true.

William Shakespeare

44.

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.

Bacon, Francis

45.

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

46.

There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

47.

Thought is the fountain of speech.

Chrysippus

48.

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

49.

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

Proverb, Arabian

50.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Sir Francis Bacon