Speech Quotes - Page 12

• Never drink more than one cocktail before giving a talk. True, the drinks may relax you, but they may also slur your speech and blur your memory, making you wonder who are all those people out there and why are they staring at you?

  Teresa Bloomingdale

  Memories, People, Giving

  Teresa Bloomingdale (1983). “Murphy must have been a mother!: (and other laws I live by)”, Macmillan Reference USA

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• Ten doors are opened if one door be shut: the finger is the interpreter of the dumb man's tongue.

  Saib Tabrizi

  Men, Doors, Dumb

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• Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

  Arthur Quinn

  House, Ordinary, Language

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• The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason.

  Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine

  Writing, Men, Media

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• I indeed had only one scene, one speech, one little speech, but it was with Robin Williams.

  Charles Keating, Jr.

  Littles, Robins, Scene

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• Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.

  Lawrence M. Friedman

  Sex, Children, Writing

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• When you speak to any, especially of quality, look them full in the face; other gestures betraying want of breeding, confidence, or honesty; dejected eyes confessing, to most judgments, guilt or folly.

  Frances Osborne

  Honesty, Eye, Guilt

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• New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song.

  Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

  Song, New York, Freedom Of Speech

  Speech at the University of Oregon, Nashville, 2004.

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• I am sure that as soon as speech was invented, efforts to suppress and control it began, and that process of suppression continues unabated.

  Gilbert S. Merritt, Jr.

  Effort, Freedom Of Speech, Process

  Speech at the University of Oregon, 2004.

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• I've found him to be a disappointment. Wonderful speech in Egypt, and good intentions aside, foreign policy needs to be firmly grounded in reality, and understanding of a sort of chaos theory...[that is to say] it needs to be part good intention, part political intelligence, and part political savvy and knowledge of international interests and national burdens. President Obama has been extremely short-sighted in this sense, and if he fails, it will be a tragic blow for peaceniks and multilateralists the world over, and a manna from heaven for the Republican party.

  Munir Butt

  Disappointment, Party, Blow

  Foreign Affairs, 2009.

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• Muslims (companions) misunderstood the speech of the Prophet on the day of Ghadeer.

  Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah

  Misunderstood, Prophet, Companion

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• The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  War, Blood, Names

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• To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!

  Jaroslav Pelikan

  Beautiful, Bible, Jobs

  Jaroslav Pelikan (2006). “Whose Bible Is It?: A Short History of the Scriptures”, p.229, Penguin

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• It's a useful rule in Anglo-American communications that the English should double, and the Americans halve, the number of words they would normally employ.

  Phyllis Bentley

  Communication, Numbers, United States

  Phyllis Eleanor Bentley (1962). “"O Dreams, O Destinations": An Autobiography”, London : Gollancz

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• Most of us do not use speech to express thought. We use it to express feelings.

  Jennifer Stone

  Feelings, Use

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• What you say is who you are. How you say it is your style.

  Jennifer Stone

  Style, Who You Are

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• Down through the years certain fads of slang had come and gone, and their vestiges could be found in Janie's and Mabel's conversation, like mastodon bones in a swamp.

  Dolores Hitchens

  Years, Gone, Swamps

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• What we love usually manages to get into our conversation. What is down in the well of the heart will come up in the bucket of the speech.

  Vance Havner

  Heart, Buckets, Come Up

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• When I was a little kid, my mother and I used to watch the Golden Globes and I would dress up and she would get sparkling apple cider and we would make a tray of hors doeuvres and watch it together. And I would get up and make a pretend speech.

  Lea Michele

  Mother, Kids, Apples

  "Lea Michele: Little Miss Big-Time". Interview with Josh Patner, www.glamour.com. August 30, 2010.

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• I don't think RADA wanted me, actually. When I was at Oxford I had a boyfriend at Central [School of Speech and Drama] and it looked like the most fantastic life, but I think not going makes you more free. Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature.

  Rosamund Pike

  Drama, School, Thinking

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The right to free speech is important but it isn't as important as 'we're all human beings together, let's find solutions together.'

  Russell Brand

  Together, Important, Humans

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• America is a great place, speech is free and you're able to expose the fact that you're an idiot.

  Eric Stonestreet

  America, Able, Facts

  "Golden Globes 2012: 'Modern Family' Stars Criticize Anti-Gay Protesters, Defend Show" by Lesley Goldberg, www.hollywoodreporter.com. January 15, 2012.

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• Joan Rivers broke down barriers, advocated for free speech, and never apologized for who she was.

  Judy Gold

  Rivers, Broke, Barriers

  "Joan Rivers gave misfit girls permission to dream" by Judy Gold, www.cnn.com. September 5, 2014.

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• In laboring to be concise, I become obscure.
  [Lat., Brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio.]

  Horace

  Obscure, Concise

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• What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the character of nations.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Dream, Character, Public Opinion

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