“When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a phrenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.”

— Thomas Paine , book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

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Thomas Paine 262

English and American political activist 1737–1809

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

“My tongue, not my pen, is my instrument.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Conversation with Thomas Jones (7 January 1946), quoted in Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters. 1931-1950 (Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 540.
1940s

“The pen is the tongue of the soul; as are the thoughts engendered there, so will be the things written.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

La pluma es la lengua del alma: cuales fueren los conceptos que en ella se engendraren, tales serán sus escritos.
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 16, as translated by Henry Edward Watts (1895).

“Aid the dawning, tongue and pen;
Aid it, hopes of honest men!”

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) British writer

"Clear the Way".
Legends of the Isles and Other Poems (1851)

“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"”

John Greenleaf Whittier Maud Muller

Bret Harte wrote a famous parody of this famous poem, "Mrs. Judge Jenkins" in which the Judge marries Maud, and which he ends with the lines:
Maud soon thought the Judge a bore,
With all his learning and all his lore;
And the Judge would have bartered Maud's fair face
For more refinement and social grace.
If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
More sad are these we daily see:
"It is, but hadn't ought to be".
Maud Muller (1856)
Context: Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,
For rich repiner and household drudge!
God pity them both! and pity us all,
Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;
For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"