“A great speech is literature.”

—  Peggy Noonan

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A great speech is literature." by Peggy Noonan?
Peggy Noonan photo
Peggy Noonan 16
American author and journalist 1950

Related quotes

Terry Eagleton photo

“Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

Introduction: What is Literature?, p. 2
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Context: Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

John Steinbeck photo

“Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1962)
Context: Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches — nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.

“A great man who wrote and spoke great speeches as the leader of a great cause: Great., Great. Great!”

Harry Markowitz (1927) American economist

On Winston Churchill http://www.amazon.com/review/R7UQOFFBBBUNN/

Henry James photo

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Hawthorne http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/hjj/nhhj1.html, (1879) ch. I: The Early Years.

Hugh Blair photo

“The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 386.

Tulsidas photo

“The Ramacharitamanas undoubtedly is the great poem worthy to rank among the great classical masterpieces of world literature.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Source: On Tulsidas’s epic Ramacharritamanas, P.E.Keay in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 35

Matthew Arnold photo

“Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

"Preface to Poems" (1854)

Françoise Sagan photo
T.S. Eliot photo

“The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

"Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)

Related topics