Quotes About Speech

There is a fine line between free speech and hate speech. Free speech encourages debate whereas hate speech incites violence.

Our job isn't to defend freedom of speech, but without freedom of speech we are dead. We can't live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than live like a rat.

Free speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition, needs no protection.

EVERY intention which does not assert itself by deeds is a vain intention, and the speech which expresses it is idle speech. It is action which proves life and establishes will

Speak only the speech that neither torments self nor does harm to others. That speech is truly well spoken.

I think, you know, we always tell candidates, show, don`t tell, what you`re all about. I think Hillary Clinton's speech was an important speech that people are going to look at and they`re going to see not just the attacks on Donald Trump, but also her admission that maybe she`d been part of the polarization problem as well and she could do better.

I wrote this speech thinking this was going to be it. It's not it. You guys went and screwed up my whole speech. We've got to come back here on Tuesday and drink some more beer.

People are already talking about the next presidential election. There's stories all over about who might run. At a recent speech, a prominent Democrat said that Hillary Clinton should not run because she can't win. Immediately after the speech, Hillary told her husband to shut up.

I am not a political person. My involvement in the Free Speech Movement is religious and moral... I don't know what made me get up and give that first speech. I only know I had to. What was it Kierkegaard said about free acts? They're the ones that, looking back, you realize you couldn't help doing.

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?

Look at what's happening on campuses for free speech. They're literally, literally limiting what people can say, under the guise of preventing people from getting hurt feelings. They are limiting constitutionally protected speech to save people from being offended or hurt. And so, denying people freedom is portrayed as a wonderful thing. That's how the left seduce people.

As so often, a political event involving Donald Trump looks like swinging wildly between melodrama and farce. The Republican National Convention in Cleveland has begun with accusations of plagiarism after Mr Trump's wife Melania gave a speech dotted with sentences that appeared to have been lifted from a speech that Michelle Obama gave in 2008.

Earlier in my political career, I had the opportunity to read the speech, and I almost threw up. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/post/santorum-says-he-almost-threw-up-after-reading-jfk-speech-on-separation-of-church-and-state/2012/02/26/gIQA91hubR_blog.html)

Now is the time to draw a clean, clear, bright line and say if you are engaging in speech over the Internet you do not have to check with your lawyer or your accountant. You are a free American, and you have the opportunity to engage in free speech over the Internet.

But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

When you're standing in front of an audience like this that is so enthusiastic and so much behind you, it is very hard to give a bad speech. Even a bad speech sounds good in a convention hall like this.

The most effective way to combat speech you don’t like is with speech.

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

Right speech comes out of silence and right silence comes out of speech.

If the Government is going to intrude upon the sacred ground of the First Amendment and tell its citizens that their exercise of protected speech could land them in jail, the law imposing such a penalty must clearly define the prohibited speech not only for the potential offender but also for the potential enforcer.

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

[Larry Kramer] got really mad at me once. The precipitating incident was a speech at Yale by the first President Bush's Secretary of Heath and Human Services, Louis Sullivan, against which Larry led a demonstration. He got the demonstrators to drown out Sullivan's speech, which wasn't allowed.

I gave the graduation speech at my high school. Not because I was valedictorian but because the grade voted for me to do it. And I gave a slightly contentious speech. I was a little critical of the administration. But for a long time it said on Wikipedia that I took my balls out and exposed myself to the crowd.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, "thought comes before speech."

People are falling all over themselves to send you free shoes and free cufflinks and colonic irrigations for two. Nobody ever offers you a free acceptance speech. There just seems to be a gap in the market. I would love to be able to pull out a speech by Dolce & Gabbana.

Abuses of the freedom of speech ought to be repressed, but to whom are we to commit the power of doing it?

The message that President Obama delivered in his speech at Notre Dame was: morality is immoral. Pro-life is the extremist position, not a moral position. Yet we should compromise and work to reduce abortions. Where's the compromise between life and death - and why work to reduce the number of them occurring if there's nothing wrong with them?

The truth is libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy and community.

Stand-up comedy and comedy in general is the ultimate form of free speech, because you get to poke holes in all the pretentious bubbles politicians and pundits and popes and pretenders try to float over our heads.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

Atheist is really ʺa thoroughly honest, unambiguous term,ʺ it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear - cut issues and unambiguous speech.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.

To have a specific style is to be poor in speech.

Eloquent speech is not from lip to ear, but rather from heart to heart.

Most of us do not use speech to express thought. We use it to express feelings.

President Reagan was a master communicator. In this particular speech he did a brilliant job moving between the stately role of U.S. President and a national eulogist. The pain of the event was etched on his face. In 4 short minutes, he addressed five different audiences. He spoke to the collective mourners, families of the fallen, NASA employees, school children, and even took a poke at Russia. He communicated comfort and patriotism within a very short timeframe. That's not easy to do.

I didn't make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years. And I just focused almost exclusively on my initiatives for national crime legislation, foreign policy issues.

Native Americans are the original inhabitants of the land that now constitutes the United States. They have helped develop the fundamental principles of freedom of speech and separation of powers that form the foundation of the United States Government.

I am absolutely opposed to political correctness. You cannot confront hate speech until you've experienced it. You need to hear every side of the issue instead of just one.

Writing with voice is writing into which someone has breathed. It has that fluency, rhythm, and liveliness that exist naturally in the speech of most people when they are enjoying a conversation...Writing with real voice has the power to make you pay attention and understand --the words go deep.

Of course you will insist on modesty in the children, and respect to their teachers, but if the boy stops you in your speech, cries out that you are wrong and sets you right, hug him!

President Bush was once asked which Presidential speech he admired most. He replied that it was the one Teddy Roosevelt had in his pocket that had helped cushion the blow of a would-be assassin's bullet.

We are resolved to protect individual freedom of belief. This freedom must include the child as well as the parent. The freedom for which we stand is not freedom of belief as we please,... not freedom to evade responsibility, ...but freedom to be honest in speech and action, freedom to respect one's own integrity of thought and feeling, freedom to question, to investigate, to try, to understand life and the universe in which life abounds, freedom to search anywhere and everywhere to find the meaning of Being, freedom to experiment with new ways of living that seem better than the old.

His ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.

Everyone gets surprised because neither one of my parents play golf. Like I said in my speech, my aunt and uncle really love golf, and we visited them, and she gave me two clubs. Like people think when they don't know who my dad is, they think he's my coach.

You need to take small steps when you dream big dreams. I am a published author with dyslexia, a professional speaker who was in speech therapy for three years as a child because I had a lisp; and a slow stiff kid from the suburbs who became an All-Pro in the NFL.