Speech Quotes - Page 16

• Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.

  George Steiner

  Hate, Believe, People

  Interview with D.J.R. Bruckner, www.nytimes.com. 1982.

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• Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?

  George Eliot

  Prayer, Reflection, Roots

  George Eliot (2004). “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life”, p.552, Broadview Press

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• Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Communication, Listening, Half

  Michel de Montaigne (1980). “Essays”

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• There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech.... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains.

  H. L. Mencken

  Running, Dog, Rain

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• Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.

  Richard Dawkins

  Sex, Philosophy, Rights

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• [That] my body be buried as cheaply as possible and no speeches be permitted at my funeral.

  Charles Bradlaugh

  Funeral, Atheism, Body

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• If unbridled licence of speech and writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of nature, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Writing, Errors, Race

  Pope Leo XIII (1990). “A Light in the Heavens: Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII”, p.108, TAN Books

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• I really believe that God builds all the bridges, writes all the books, and delivers all the speeches. When I say God, again, I mean that source we all come from, we all are pieces of, and we all are connected to.

  Wayne Dyer

  Believe, Book, Writing

  "Interview With New Age Retailer". Interview with Ray Hemachandra, www.drwaynedyer.com. November, 2005.

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• If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

  Gloria Steinem

  Numbers, Freedom Of Speech, Democracy

  Source: bluestockingsmag.com

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• We [in USA] have people honestly believing that, if a president calls a war, you have to shut up and sing. That is not the nation my mother raised me to pledge my allegiance to. We should speak out. We sent thousands of Americans to foreign battlefields to protect our way of life, which includes free speech. If you're not going to use it, it's already lost. We'll find a Mussolini who will tell us what's good for us.

  Phil Donahue

  Mother, War, Believe

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• It's daunting trying to do any service as an American to such a beautiful, fluid speech pattern that you [British] all have. We are just barbarians in comparison.

  Jake Gyllenhaal

  Beautiful, Trying, Patterns

  "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - Jake Gyllenhaal interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• 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

  Philosophy, Ideas, People

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• We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator's power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  Rights, Years, Freedom Of Speech

  Franklin D. Roosevelt (1995). “The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt”, Gramercy

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• Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Education, World, Weakness

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.392, Stanford University Press

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• We can speak very much to the purpose and yet in such a way that the whole world cries out in contradiction: namely, when we are not speaking to the whole world.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Way, Purpose, World

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• Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet toits god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.

  Havelock Ellis

  Running, Art, Latin

  Havelock Ellis (1915). “Impressions and comments”

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• The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

  Willa Cather

  Distance, Thinking, Giving

  Willa Cather (2012). “The Song of the Lark”, p.189, Courier Corporation

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• All men are really most attracted by the beauty of plain speech, and they even write in a florid style in imitation of this. Theyprefer to be misunderstood rather than to come short of its exuberance.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beauty, Writing, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.516, Simon and Schuster

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• Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Music, Forever, Speak

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.190, Graphic Arts Books

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• It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Communication, Men, Literature

  Henry David Thoreau (2012). “The Portable Thoreau”, p.356, Penguin

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• Honest speech does not seek secret places.

  St. Jerome

  Honesty, Secret Places, Doe

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• My speech is too fast; my oration confused; love knows no order.

  St. Jerome

  Confused, Order, Confusion

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• The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Oratory, Foxes, Speak

  Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Stanley Link, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Princeton University (1994). “Papers”

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• Everyone asks for freedom for himself,
  The man free love, the businessman free trade,
  The writer and talker free speech and free press.

  Robert Frost

  Freedom, Men, Free Love

  Robert Frost (1936). “A Further Range”

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• Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

  Denise Levertov

  Attitude, Moving, Poetry

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