Speech Quotes - Page 17

• Each part
  of speech a spark
  awaiting redemption, each
  a virtue, a power
  in abeyance.

  Denise Levertov

  Redemption, Sparks, Virtue

  Denise Levertov (1973). “The poet in the world”, New Directions Publishing Corporation

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• Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Vices, Amplification

  Thomas Jefferson (2004). “Light and Liberty: Reflections on the Pursuit of Happiness”, p.56, Modern Library

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• Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character ofthe speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.

  Aristotle

  Character, Mind, Three

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• Speeches are like babies-easy to conceive but hard to deliver.

  Aristotle

  Baby, Easy, Hard

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• The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.

  Bill Bryson

  Average, Shoes, People

  Bill Bryson (1989). “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-town America”, p.69, VNR AG

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• PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points.

  Lewis Carroll

  Lying, Taken, Character

  Lewis Carroll (1996). “The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll”, p.1018, Wordsworth Editions

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• I have heard articulate speech produced by sunlight I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow, and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun's disk.

  Alexander Graham Bell

  Laughter, Clouds, Laughing

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• I shouldn't want you to be surprised, or to draw any particular inference from my making speeches, or not making speeches, out there. I don't recall any candidate for President that ever injured himself very much by not talking.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Talking, President, Want

  Ferrell, Calvin Coolidge, Robert H. Ferrell, Howard H. Quint (1979). “TALKATIVE PRESIDENT OFF”, Dissertations-G

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• Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

  George Santayana

  Men, Long, Beard

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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• First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

  James Joyce

  Men, Race, Illustration

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.2179, Delphi Classics

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• Funest philosophers and ponderers,
  Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

  Wallace Stevens

  Philosophical, Clouds, Philosopher

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.55, Vintage

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• Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
  Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.

  Wallace Stevens

  Dirty, Silence, Made

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.157, Knopf

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• It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
  It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
  This is the tragic accent of the scene.

  Wallace Stevens

  Rome, Poverty, Scene

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Selected Poems”, p.283, Knopf

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• Whatever is spoken of acquires a certain existence.

  Mason Cooley

  Certain, Existence, Acquire

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• Often have brief words laid men low and then raise them up.

  Sophocles

  Men, Lows, Raises

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• One thinking it is right to speak all things, whether the word is fit for speech or unutterable.

  Sophocles

  Thinking, Speak, Speed

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• Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• Reason and speech we onely bring.

  George Herbert

  Reason

  George Herbert (1861). “The Poetical Works of G. H. and R. Heber. With Memoir”, p.75

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• In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.

  Jacques Barzun

  Simple, Thinking, Color

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• When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.

  Aeschylus

  Might, Tongue, Failing

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• Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being
  and their feeling and their way of realising everything
  and every one comes out of them in repeating. More
  and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

  Gertrude Stein

  Feelings, Way, Clear

  Gertrude Stein (2016). “THE MAKING OF AMERICANS (Modern Classics Series): A History of a Family's Progress”, p.333, e-artnow

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• A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by 'mere' words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. And he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.

  Sigmund Freud

  Believe, Order, Magic

  Sigmund Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1953). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: A case of hysteria, Three essays on sexuality, and other works”

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• And from the first declension of the flesh
  I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
  Into the stony idiom of the brain.

  Dylan Thomas

  Thoughtful, Men, Thinking

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.92, New Directions Publishing

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• If you speak evil, you will soon be worse spoken of.

  Hesiod

  Evil, Gossip, Speak

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• If the oarsmen of a fast-moving ship suddenly cease to row, the suspension of the driving force of the oars doesn't prevent the vessel from continuing to move on its course. And with a speech it is much the same. After he has finished reciting the document, the speaker will still be able to maintain the same tone without a break, borrowing its momentum and impulse from the passage he has just read out.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Moving, Ships, Tone

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