Speech Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Tiberius

Thomas Carlyle

Martin Farquhar Tupper

Jimmy Carter

William Kingdon Clifford

Salman Rushdie

Benazir Bhutto

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

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

Brendan Francis

Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.

William Kingdon Clifford

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.

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

Norman O. Brown

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.

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

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

I thought a lot about our nation and what I should do as President. And Sunday night before last, I made a speech about two problems of our country – energy and malaise.

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.

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

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

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

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 a free state there should be freedom of speech and 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.

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

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

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.