Speech Quotes - Page 30

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A speech from Ernest Bevin on a major occasion had all the horrific fascination of a public execution. If the mind was left immune, eyes and ears and emotions were riveted.

  Michael Foot

  Eye, Mind, Fascination

  'Aneurin Bevan' (1962) vol. 1, ch. 13

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Speech doesn't corrupt. Money corrupts, and money isn't speech.

  Russ Feingold

  Free Speech

  "Feingold slams Dem super PACs" by James Hohmann, www.politico.com. June 17, 2011.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• [T]he categories of intentionality are nothing more nor less than the metalinguistic categories in terms of which we talk epistemically about overt speech as they appear in the framework of thoughts construed on the model of over speech.

  Wilfrid Sellars

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Framework

  8 Copy quote

• The interpretation of thought as ""inner speech" has taken different forms, and has been used to clarify a variety of problems--thus problems pertaining to the logical forms of thought and the connection of thought with things.

  Wilfrid Sellars

  Taken, Thinking, Thoughtful

  Wilfrid Sellars (1968). “Science and metaphysics: variations on Kantian themes”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are.

  Sterling K. Brown

  People, Dialect, Capable

  7 Copy quote

• Everything in journalism is about the detail that makes the whole, the attempts to reproduce speech patterns while not actually quoting the whole thing the person said.

  Neil Gaiman

  Details, Patterns, Journalism

  "Ask the Author Live:Dana Goodyear with Neil Gaiman". www.newyorker.com. January 15, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Kennedy was significantly different than Eisenhower before him, and different from Johnson after him. So those three years were the beginning of a détente with the Soviet Union, a new feeling for peace, a seeking out of a new ally with the Soviet Union - the end of the Cold War, as Kennedy called it in his American University speech.

  Oliver Stone

  War, Years, Feelings

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control.

  Gillian Anderson

  Doors, America, People

  "I'm not good at playing the game" by Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. August 27, 2005.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The corporate scandals are getting bigger and bigger. In a speech on Wall Street, President Bush spoke out on corporate responsibility, and he warned executives not to cook the books. Afterwards, Martha Stewart said the correct term was to saute the books.

  Conan O'Brien

  Wall, Book, Responsibility

  5 Copy quote

• Here again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point.
  The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in speech; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.

  Aleister Crowley

  Sacrifice, Order, Design

  Aleister Crowley (1970). “777 revised: vel, Prolegomena symbolica ad systemam sceptico-mysticae viae explicandae, fundamentum hieroglyphicum sanctissimorum scientiae summae”, Weiser Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Art, Men, People

  4 Copy quote

• Genuine laughter is true eloquence and more effective than speech

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Laughter, Genuine, Eloquence

  Mahatma Gandhi (2007). “Peace: The Words and Inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi”, p.44, Blue Mountain Arts, Inc.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• That excitement about Kossuth, consider how characteristic, but superficial, it was!--only another kind of politics or dancing. Men were making speeches to him all over the country, but each expressed only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stood on truth. They were merely banded together, as usual one leaning on another, and all together on nothing.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Education, Country, Truth

  Henry David Thoreau (2007). “My Thoughts Are Murder to the State: Thoreau's Essays on Political Philosophy”, p.177, David M Gross

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed, but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are not competent to hear them at all times.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Memories, Memorable, Heart

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.637, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most attractive sentences are, perhaps, not the wisest, but the surest and roundest. They are spoken firmly and conclusively,as if the speaker had a right to know what he says, and if not wise, they have at least been well learned.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wise, Style, Oratory

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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspiration, Heart, Yield

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden”, p.88, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Writing, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Education, Lying, Book

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010). “Essays and English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.14, Cosimo, Inc.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• President Bush delivered a commencement speech at a university in Wisconsin. A very inspirational speech. Apparently Bush told the students, 'You can do anything in life if your parents work hard enough.'

  Conan O'Brien

  Hard Work, Parent, President

  6 Copy quote

• Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk into the river. Listen to the ocean.

  Rumi

  Ocean, Rivers, Silence

  "The Essential Rumi". Book translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry and Reynold Nicholson. Chapter 18: "The Three Fish", p. 196, 1995.

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some subjects come up suddenly in our speech and cannot be silenced.

  Mason Cooley

  Talking, Silence, Come Up

  4 Copy quote

• It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Power, Criticism, Realizing

  6 Copy quote

• There are many prices we pay for freedoms secured by the First Amendment; the risk of undue influence is one of them, confirming what we have long known: Freedom is hazardous, but some restraints are worse.

  Warren E. Burger

  Long, Risk, Pay

  "Open The System, Don't Close It" by Edward H. Crane, www.cnn.com. November 25, 1996.

  29 Copy quote

  Show source