Speech Quotes - Page 18

• Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel, and they who curb prejudice and seek honorably to know and speak the truth are the only builders of a better life.

  John Galsworthy

  Honesty, Jewels, Prejudice

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• It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Inspiration, Animal, Imagination

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• He [Roosevelt] has made some speeches that indicate that he is going quite beyond anything that he advocated when he was in the White House, and has proposed a program which is absolutely impossible to carry out except by a revision of the Constitution.

  William Howard Taft

  White, House, Revision

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• The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.

  Immanuel Kant

  Art, Play, Imagination

  Immanuel Kant (2013). “Kant's Critiques”, p.691, Simon and Schuster

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• Every man is born with the faculty of reason and the faculty of speech, but why should he be able to speak before he has anything to say?

  Benjamin Whichcote

  Men, Able, Speak

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• ... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There may be truths beyond speech, and they may be of great relevance to man in the singular, that is, to man in so far as he is not a political being, whatever else he may be. Men in the plural, that is, men in so far as they live and move and act in this world, can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves.

  Hannah Arendt

  Truth, Moving, Men

  Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.4, University of Chicago Press

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• The whole art of the political speech is to put 'nothing' into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Art, Political, Sound

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• Many people believe letters the most personal and revealing form of communication. In them, we expect to find the charmer at his nap, slumped, open-mouthed, profoundly himself without thought for appearances. Yet, this is not quite true. Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Powerful, Believe, Communication

  Elizabeth Hardwick (2017). “The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick”, p.27, New York Review of Books

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• True and false are attributes of speech not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood. Error theremay be, as when we expect that which shall not be; or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be charged with untruth.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Truth, Lying, Men

  Leviathan pt. 1, ch. 4 (1651)

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• There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Player, Action, Language

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• Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.

  Stuart Chase

  Fashion, Animal, Men

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• Peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, long after our votes have been tallied.

  Barack Obama

  Long, Together, Compromise

  Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. September 21, 2011.

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• Fill your mouth with marbles and make a speech. Every day reduce the number of marbles in your mouth and make a speech. You will soon become an accredited public speaker -- as soon as you have lost all your marbles.

  Brooks Hays

  Time, Numbers, Mouths

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• Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quitewell developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you'll see what I mean.

  Northrop Frye

  Children, Mean, Thinking

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• The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as 'Communists' or 'Fascists' by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.

  Margaret Chase Smith

  Tired, America, Sick

  Declaration of Conscience, delivered 1 June 1950

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• I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another

  John Ashbery

  Ridiculous, Lost, Accents

  John Ashbery (1985). “A Wave: Poems”, p.38, Ardent Media

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• Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.

  Terry Eagleton

  Everyday, Ordinary, Literature

  Terry Eagleton (2011). “Literary Theory: An Introduction”, p.2, John Wiley & Sons

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• Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

  Greil Marcus

  Voice, Strange, Kind

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• Swear words and profanities are mere abbreviations of speech, similar to the abbreviations in writing.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Writing, Abbreviations, Profanity

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• When Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government fell in May 1940, the nation turned to Churchill. At last, his unique qualities were brought to bear on a supreme challenge, and with his unshakable optimism, his heroic vision, and above all, his splendid speeches, Churchill roused the spirit of the British people.

  Gretchen Rubin

  Unique, Government, People

  Gretchen Rubin (2004). “Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill: A Brief Account of a Long Life”, p.17, Random House

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• The time has now come to amend the Constitution to restore freedom of speech for America's people of faith.

  Ralph E. Reed, Jr.

  Christian, Religious, America

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• Religious expression must at least be afforded an equal playing field. Currently, the playing field is not level. Religious expression and practices are treated as second class forms of speech and singled out for discrimination.

  Mathew Staver

  Christian, Religious, Expression

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• Nowhere have the forces of intolerance been displayed less tolerantly than in the area of religious speech and practice.

  Cal Thomas

  Christian, Religious, Practice

  Cal Thomas (1994). “The things that matter most”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• Early American speeches, from Washington's to Patrick Henry's, have been detheologized in history textbooks. No one has called it censorship.

  James G. Watt

  Christian, Religious, Textbooks

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• A city built upon mud;
  A culture built upon profit;
  Free speech nipped in the bud,
  The minority always guilty.
  Why should I want to go back
  To you, Ireland, my Ireland?

  Louis MacNeice

  Cities, Culture, Bud

  Louis MacNeice (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.177, Faber & Faber

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