Speech Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

All that you see was and is for your sake. The numerous books, uncanny markings, and beautiful thoughts are the ghosts of souls who preceded you. The speech they weave is a link between you and your human siblings. The consequences that cause sorrow and rapture are the seeds that the past has sown in the field of the soul, and by which the future shall profit.

Where there are so many, all speech becomes a debate without end. But two together may perhaps find wisdom.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Free speech carries with it the evil of all foolish, unpleasant venomous things that are said but, on the whole, we would rather lump them than do away with them.

Winston Churchill

Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

Let us make it evident that we intend to do justice. Then let us make it equally evident that we will not tolerate injustice being done to us in return. Let us further make it evident that we use no words which we are not prepared to back up with deeds, and that while our speech is always moderate, we are ready and willing to make it good. Such an attitude will be the surest possible guarantee of that self-respecting peace, the attainment of which is and must ever be the prime aim of a self-governing people.

Theodore Roosevelt

Speech is the birthright of every child. It is the deaf child's one fair chance to keep in touch with his fellows.

And I will add this point of merely personal experience of humanity: when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it. When they have no explanation to offer, they give short dignified replies, disdainful of the ignorance of the multitude.

G. K. Chesterton

Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term "unconditional surrender."The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech--in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

Son of Atreus, what manner of speech has escaped the barrier of your teeth?

To A.P. Herbert about his first speech as a newly elected Member of Parliament:

That wasn't a maiden speech — it was a brazen hussy of a speech — a painted tart of a speech.

Winston Churchill

A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

G. K. Chesterton

Without Freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech.

Benjamin Franklin

It is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech … that are the true ends of knowledge … but it is a restitution and reinvesting, in great part, of man to the sovereignty and power, for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names, he shall again command them.

I do not much dislike the matter, but
The manner of his speech.

William Shakespeare

When the vain speaker has sat down, and the people say 'what a good speech,' it still takes an ounce to balance an ounce.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The form of a work of art, which gives speech to their thoughts and is, therefore, their mode of talking, is always somewhat uncertain, like all kinds of speech.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Music for entertainment... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.

Theodor W. Adorno

Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage

Winston Churchill

Truth is a thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time, nor does it take away the freedom of speech which proceeds from justice; but it gives to us the knowledge of what is just and lawful, separating from them the unjust and refuting them.

Let thy speech of God be renewed day by day, aye, rather than thy meat and drink.

It had been hard to have put more truth and untruth together in a few words than in that speech, "Whosoever is delighted with solitude is either a wild beast or a god."

Lamon, that speech won't scour. It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.

Abraham Lincoln

I may disappoint you but I don't share the common excitement about the speech by Greta Thunberg.