Speech Quotes
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And he sang to them, now in the Elven tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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Speech is our second possession, after the soul-and perhaps we have no other possession in this world.
Gabriela Mistral
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Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war... Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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The superior man * * * in regard to his speech * * * is anxious that it should be sincere.
Confucius
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Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.
Barnett Newman
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My plainness of speech makes people hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth.
Plato
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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
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No speech can stain what is noble by nature.
Sophocles
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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
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There is a terrific apprehension among some people that blacks will take over the sport... It will create problems because their behavior, speech and dress is just a completely different culture.
Arthur Ashe
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Free speech is one of our fundamental principles and it's pretty hard to speak freely when people are yelling at you when it's your turn. That would never be allowed in a classroom or in any other kind of meeting.
Jack Layton
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If the whole world should agree to speak nothing but truth, what an abridgment it would make of speech! And what an unravelling there would be of the invisible webs which men, like so many spiders, now weave about each other!
Washington Allston
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I'm not one who can write out a speech and remember all the names of the people that you need to thank because you need to thank all of those people.
Morgan Freeman
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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
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I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.
Tom Stoppard
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Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her. The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech, of the confusion of the oral;
Elena Ferrante
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In the faculty of speech man excels the brute; but if thou utterest what is improper, the brute is they superior.
Saadi
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While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented.
Ethan Zuckerman
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To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
Louise Erdrich
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And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima.
Thomas Hobbes
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You could protect a religious minority against gays and lesbians. Or you could protect gays and lesbians against a religious minority. And then, it seems to me something political is happening. Because we're not really looking at the kind of speech that is injurious.
Judith Butler
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Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being "pushed to an extreme," not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.
John Stuart Mill
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The more a government strives to curtail freedom of speech, the more obstinately is it resisted; not indeed by the avaricious, ... but by those whom good education, sound morality, and virtue have rendered more free.
Baruch Spinoza
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Deliberation is not a particular type of speech, but a political act of collective decision-making in consideration of consequences.
F. David Mathews