Popular quotes about Speech! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 22
Free speech is important whether you like what's being said or not. The reason why it's so important is that the entire spectrum of ideas needs to be heard so that the best ones are embraced and rise to the top. If you're a liberal and don't like conservative speech and you try to stifle that conservative speech, you need to be prepared for your own progressive speech to be stifled when the power shifts out of your favor.
Shepard FaireyOur 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.
CharbBecause of the free speech clause in the First Amendment, which is very clear, "The government shall make no law abridging freedom of speech," and it literally is about political speech. You can say anything you want about politics, a candidate, and the government cannot stop you. And the Democrats hate that.
Rush LimbaughMake no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license," and they will define freedom out of existence.
Voltairine de CleyreFree speech is against governments, not against the NBA. So the players and coaches and indeed owners have been fined for their speech, which is costly rather than free. I sort of acknowledge that there is not free speech when you agree to work in the NBA.
David SternNo man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech.
James A. Garfield[A] society which makes freedom its primary goal will lose it, because it has made, not responsibility, but freedom from responsibility, its purpose. When freedom is the basic emphasis, it is not responsible speech which is fostered but irresponsible speech.
R.J. RushdoonyI've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech-if not all human speech-is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder-they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.
Li-Young LeeI 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.
Anita DunnYou are good when you are fully awake in your speech, Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without purpose. And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.
Khalil GibranAfter my recent brush with voicelessness, I thought I'd share with you a few thoughts about speech. Don't take it lightly my friends. If music is the pathway to the heart as Voltaire suggested, then speech is the pathway to other people. Live in silence and you live alone.
Henry BromellThe Bill of Rights was intended to secure freedom of speech - the freedom of speech of members of parliament to speak freely rather than be at threat of... the threat of an over powerful monarch at the time.
William HagueI remember somebody saying something to me about Frost/Nixon, when Anthony Hopkins does his famous speech, and the difference in the way Anthony did it was to dramatize, essentially, what was a documentary-style version of that speech. I remember someone saying to me, "There is artistic liberty."
Vanessa KirbyIf you only stand up for speech you approve of, you're a hack. If you only stand up for speech that everyone approves of, you're a coward.
Glenn ReynoldsNow 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.
John DoolittleOne day I heard a speech of Hitler. In this speech he said that the German factory worker and the German labourer must make common cause with the German intellectual worker.
Fritz SauckelWe [Americans] know Martin Luther King Jr. as a statue. We know him as a holiday. We know him as a speech. We don't know him as a man. Most people don't even know the whole speech, just "I have a dream." They don't know what his speaking voice was like, how he looked at his wife, or that he had four kids.
Ava DuVernayNew Rule: President Bush must stop acting like WE'RE the idiots. He gives speech after speech, and the theme is always the same; 'What part of freedom don't you get, you morons?'. I'll answer that for you Mr. President. The part where you give it to people by blowing them up.
Bill MaherThe court has said you are entitled to robust speech on public sidewalks, even insulting speech.
Jay SekulowIf 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.
Ronald L. BuckwalterThe Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and software has been treated as a form of speech ever since. So if software code is speech, Apple says the First Amendment also means the government can't tell Apple what to say.
Laura SydellHillary Clinton wrote an Op-Ed for a paper in Iowa about her plans to help the middle class. Middle-class Americans said, 'Why didn't you just say that in a speech?' and she said, 'Because I charge $200,000 for a speech.'
Jimmy FallonYes, I heard my people singing!-in the glow of parlor coal-stove and on summer porches sweet with lilac air, from choir loft and Sunday morning pews-and my soul was filled with their harmonies. Then, too, I heard these songs in the very sermons of my father, for in the Negro's speech there is much of the phrasing and rhythms of folk-song. The great, soaring gospels we love are merely sermons that are sung; and as we thrill to such gifted gospel singers as Mahalia Jackson, we hear the rhythmic eloquence of our preachers, so many of whom, like my father, are masters of poetic speech.
Paul RobesonWit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.
Christian Nestell BoveeSpeech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.
Michel de MontaigneJohn F.Kennedy gave probably the greatest inauguration speech ever that first time, but I guarantee you when he first walked out there he was thinking, "Goodness gracious this is big and I better be up to the task."
Barack ObamaMan'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 NewmanThe 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.
Paul GoodmanFreedom of speech and of the press are essential to the enlightenment of a free people and in restraining those who wield power.
Felix FrankfurterPeople ask me if I miss the States. I miss African Americans. But not the U.S. government or all the things they put me through. I miss African American culture, our speech, dance and cooking.
Assata ShakurWhen the ACLU took my case and we got a ruling I think, for the first time, they could - the Congress could put out the report internally but they couldn't put it out at taxpayers' expense around the country. And I felt odd about that because I, in a way, I was interfering with free speech, but then, you can't always win.
Nat HentoffIndeed, theological discourse offers its strange jubilation only to the strict extent that it permits and, dangerously, demands of it wokman that he speak beyond his means, precisely because he does not speak of himself. Hence the danger of a speech that, in a sense, speaks against the one who lends himself to it. One must obtain forgiveness for every essay in theology. In all senses.
Jean-Luc MarionWe are being at once wisely aware of our own frivolity if we avoid hitting and whacking and prefer 'striking' and 'smiting'; talk and chat and prefer 'speech' and 'discourse'; well-bred, brilliant, or polite noblemen (visions of snobbery columns in the Press, and fat men on the Riviera) and prefer the 'worthy, brave and courteous men' of long ago.
J. R. R. TolkienWe do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
Mahatma GandhiWe who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
Barbara EhrenreichBaseball is to our everyday experience what poetry often is to common speech โ a slightly elevated and concentrated form.
Thomas BoswellSpeech was given to the ordinary sort of men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.
Robert SouthBut please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.
John McCainWithout general elections, without freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, without the free battle of opinions, life in every public institution withers away, becomes a caricature of itself, and bureaucracy rises as the only deciding factor.
Rosa LuxemburgAt all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom from want... for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.
Eleanor RooseveltHis ear heard more than what was said to him, and his slow speech had overtones not of thought, but of understanding beyond thought.
John SteinbeckEmpathy - that is, caring about people and acting responsibly on that care, not just for yourself, but for others - this is something that Barack Obama understands very well. He was a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago for ten years. As an expert on the Constitution and on our family values, he understands very well that the country is fundamentally about caring for one another. The day after his speech, he was interviewed on CNN, and Anderson Cooper asked him what patriotism was. He said patriotism begins with caring for one another.
George LakoffIn 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