Quotes About Speech

If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech - which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech - is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.

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

Because 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.

If you're offended, what the Supreme Court has said the answer to speech you do not like is not less speech, it's more speech. There are many people in America who don't get that.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

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

[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.

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.

Ted Sorrenson, JFK's presidential speech writer, when asked how it came about that he wrote the "ask not what you can do..." speech, he would answer 'ask not.'

I believe in freedom of speech, and at the same time I think that sometimes it can be worth it to not say something. In my opinion there is a sort of limit to that freedom, but where that limit exactly lies is open for discussion. As soon as there is no longer any discussion possible, than it has reached its limits and therefore freedom of speech will no longer exist.

The United States is a land of free speech. Nowhere is speech freer - not even here where we sedulously cultivate it even in its most repulsive form.

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

It is amazing how many people act as if the right to free speech includes the right to be free of criticism for what you say - which means that other people should not have the same right to free speech that they claim for themselves.

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)

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

I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

The meaning of what is said is according to the motive for saying it: because things are not subject to speech, but speech to things. Therefore we should take account of the motive of the lawgiver, rather than of his very words.

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans ... and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

I don't care if Trump has $100 billion. He's earned it. He's had a job. There are ways you can track what he has earned. The Clintons don't want to admit how they've earned their money. They love to brag about their wealth, but how did they get it? Making speeches, $750,000 for one speech from a firm that now has close ties with Mrs. Clinton as a secretary of state and potentially as president? It's $750,000 for one speech.

[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.

If I stop today at a protest and I read a speech, it is a speech that remains in that moment, and whoever captures it does, and whoever doesn't, doesn't, and just keeps walking. It is very sterile, and it can seem even inaccessible and boring for a community.

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense - the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.

The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails. Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the C.D.A. would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result.

Life is more than thought: what a man feels, and what his senses awaken in him, are more indispensable to his life's fullness than subsequent reflection on their significance. Both Stirner and Nietzsche have elaborated Faust's opening speech in which he bemoans his wasted years in academia: this speech is Goethe's own impeachment of Kant and Hegel . Philosophy proceeds always under the risk of making a fetish of thinking.

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.

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

We don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves.

In rendering its decision in our case, the Supreme Court equated money with speech because these days it takes the first to make yourself heard.

Speech belongs half to the speaker, half to the listener. The latter must prepare to receive it according to the motion it takes.

Any kind of restrictions put on free speech would have worse consequences than bullying.

Many believe that Hillary Clinton was channeling President Obama during her recent speech in New York City. She focused on equality, justice, and how hard it was for her growing up as a young black man in Hawaii.

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

Satire must always accompany any free society. It is an absolute necessity. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, they understood the need for the court jester, the one soul allowed to tell the truth through laughter. It is, in many ways, the most powerful form of free speech because it is aimed at those in power, or those whose ideas would spread hate. It is the canary in the coalmine, a cultural thermometer, and it always has to push, push, push the boundaries of society to see how much it’s grown.

The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way.

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?

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.

All Americans value the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, and I believe this is essential for our continued way of life. But with this freedom comes responsibility. That responsibility has been abdicated here by some in the media and some in the government.

While we generally believe in free speech and giving everyone as much ability to speak as possible, in practice there are lots of barriers to that, whether it's legal restrictions, technological restrictions or you can't share what you want if you don't have access to the internet.

I have observed in my 30 years in Washington that when a President initiates a major policy speech on a controversial issue while Congress is in recess, it usually is because what he is advocating is indefensible and that he is seeking to minimize criticism.

I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad.

I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, "You can like Mozart and ice hockey..." - and then I used to say "golf," but Tiger took over golf! - "and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades."

Poetry is one of the most fugitive arts: it can be assigned to memory, taken and hidden in the mind, smuggled into smoky cabin back rooms, recited there and then conveyed only by speech to another person. It is therefore the most likely to survive colonization.

I became simply a pair of eyes, staring through my mask at Char. I needed no ears because I was too far off to hear his voice, no words because I was too distant for speech, and no thoughts - those I saved for later. He bent his head. I loved the hairs on the nape of his neck. He moved his lips. I admired their changing shape. He clasped his hand. I blessed his fingers. Once, the power of my gaze drew his eyes.

People can do bad things with free speech as well as good. You have to defend the Ku Klux Klan as well as Martin Luther King. It's like that. If you're going to defend the principle, then you have to defend people who use the principle badly.

A speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener.