Speech Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Mere brave speech without action is letting off useless steam.

They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, it

It had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together, in a few words, than in that speech: 'Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast, or a god.'

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.

The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

Rabindranath Tagore

Speech belongs half to him who speaks and half to him who hears.

Michel de Montaigne

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

Søren Kierkegaard

Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue-where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk-otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

'You're frightfully BBC in your language this afternoon, Albert,' said Tuppance, with some exasperation.
Albert looked slightly taken aback and reverted to a more natural form of speech.
'I was listening to a very interesting talk on pond life last night,' he explained.

Agatha Christie

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech...As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere...When it begins to exist in others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually.
Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.

The expression of a man's face is commonly a help to his thoughts, or glossary on his speech; but the countenance of Newman Noggs, in his ordinary moods, was a problem which no stretch of ingenuity could solve.

Charles Dickens

Speech... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.

Agatha Christie

I don't know where to begin my speech. I don't know what people would be expecting me to say, but first of all thank you to God for whom we are equal and thank you to every person who has prayed for my fast recovery and new life.

Malala Yousafzai

The gentleman desires to be halting in speech but quick in action.

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.