“Can it be doubtful that this is still the rule of human education; that the human creature needs first of all to be educated not that he may speak, but that he may have something weighty and valuable to say! If speech is the bank-note of an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honored. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind, but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and now almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a forged one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world, which are in sad truth infallible, and of amount incalculable.”

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

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Thomas Carlyle481

Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881

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“Considered as the last finish of education, or of human culture, worth and acquirement, the art of speech is noble, and even divine; it is like the kindling of a Heaven's light to show us what a glorious world exists, and has perfected itself, in a man.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

“It lies deep in our habits, confirmed by all manner of educational and other arrangements for several centuries back, to consider human talent as best of all evincing itself by the faculty of eloquent speech. Our earliest schoolmasters teach us, as the one gift of culture they have, the art of spelling and pronouncing, the rules of correct speech; rhetorics, logics follow, sublime mysteries of grammar, whereby we may not only speak but write. And onward to the last of our schoolmasters in the highest university, it is still intrinsically grammar, under various figures grammar. To speak in various languages, on various things, but on all of them to speak, and appropriately deliver ourselves by tongue or pen,—this is the sublime goal towards which all manner of beneficent preceptors and learned professors, from the lowest hornbook upwards, are continually urging and guiding us.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

“Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and”

Daniel Levitin (1957) American psychologist

This is Your Brain on Music (2006)
Context: Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

“The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity — perhaps even more so — as Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Keep Your Filthy Hands Off The Internet" 20 June 2010.

“The argument, in essence, is that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech. This analysis turns the First Amendment upside down. The Government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech. Protected speech does not become unprotected merely because it resembles the latter. The Constitution requires the reverse.”

Anthony Kennedy (1936) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002) (Opinion of the Court).

“But in her striving toward education, woman must remember that all educational systems are only the means for the development of a higher knowledge and culture. The true culture of thought is developed by the culture of spirit and heart. Only such a combination gives that great synthesis without which it is impossible to realize the real grandeur, diversity, and complexity of human life in its cosmic evolution. Therefore, while striving to knowledge, may woman remember the Source of Light and the Leaders of Spirit—those great Minds who, verily, created the consciousness of humanity. In approaching this Source, this leading Principle of Synthesis, humanity will find the way to real evolution.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

1 March 1929

“Where God clings to our culture, to our routines of discourse, He is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech. So Nietzsche”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

and many after him
Real Presences (1989), I: A Secondary City

“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson book Nature

Source: Nature

“Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.”

Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer

"Under One Small Star"
Poems New and Collected (1998), Could Have (1972)
Context: I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

“My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.”

Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) Russian composer

Letter to Lyudmila Shestakova, July 30, 1868; Jay Leyda and Sergei Bertensson The Musorgsky Reader (1947) p. 113.

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