Speech Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Emil Cioran

Thomas Mann

Jules Feiffer

John Wesley Powell

Benazir Bhutto

Salman Rushdie

Jimmy Carter

The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.

Anthony Kennedy

I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.

A quotation in a speech, article, or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

Brendan Francis

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Norman O. Brown

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

The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Kenneth Rexroth

The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.

Anthony Kennedy

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech.

I love eulogies. They are the most moving kind of speech because they attempt to pluck meaning from the fog, and on short order, when the emotions are still ragged and raw and susceptible to leaps.

An educated man... is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

In either case the orator should bear clearly in mind throughout his whole speech what the fiction is to which he has committed himself, since we are apt to forget our falsehoods, and there is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory.

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

There are more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in butter; but this is the sort of thing (as the proverb indicates) we overlook: there are more ways of outraging speech than contradiction merely.

Laughter is, after speech, the chief thing that holds society together.

America's greatest contribution to the world is its concept of democracy, its concept of freedom, freedom of action, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

Music is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact, nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.

I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

John Wesley Powell

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

Variant translation: Music is the literature of the heart, it takes up communication where words stop.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion all have a double aspect - freedom of thought and freedom of action.