Speech Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.

David Nicholls (writer)

I approached each speech draft as if it might someday appear under Kennedy's name in a collection of the world's great speeches.

Theodore Sorensen

In the world of commercial speech, tobacco advertising bears the earmarks of an endangered species.

Jef I. Richards

Why then should words challenge Eternity, When greatest men, and greatest actions die? Use may revive the obsoletest words, And banish those that now are most in vogue; Use is the judge, the law, and rule of speech.

A savage-creating stubborn-pulling fellow, Uncurbed, unfettered, uncontrolled of speech, Unperiphrastic, bombastiloquent.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!

Washington Allston

The material is destined, in the end, to remain a mere auxiliary, just good enough to enable stammering to become speech.

We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make — we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

As long as I am mayor of this city the great industries are secure. We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear these words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist." You never hear a real American talk like that.

Give me an opportunity to fail," Saiman said. "I promise my corpse won't interrupt your 'I told you so' speech.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Barbara Ehrenreich

For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen'd to break off
I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,
H' had hard words, ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;
Else, when with greatest art he spoke,
You'd think he talk'd like other folk,
For all a rhetorician's rules
Teach nothing but to name his tools.

Samuel Butler (poet)

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

If someone is being rude to a black person on the train, it is your job to challenge that person even if you do get punched in the face. We must always challenge behavior and speech which is othering certain groups.

Molly Scott Cato

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech — it is a gift from heart to heart.

Everybody, every profession, every trade changes its vocabulary all of the time. But there is a basic pure human speech that exists in every language. And that is the language of the poet and the writer.

Katherine Anne Porter

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place, It has to face the man of the time.

Wallace Stevens

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

My one claim to originality among Irishmen is that I have never made a speech.

But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it's lyric verse.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.

It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought.