Quotes about speech
page 10

“His father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's Trade, but when he kill'd a Calfe he would doe it in high style, and make a Speech.”

John Aubrey book Brief Lives

"William Shakespeare"
Brief Lives

Exercises, Boy

“Because long-held internalized views and attitudes appear especially powerful in death, the daily practice should include body, speech, and mind, so that the teachings slide from the head to the heart as fast as possible. It is certain and a real gift that the Buddhist methods will help in both this life and afterward.”

Lama Ole Nydahl (1941) Danish lama

Fearless Death: Buddhist Wisdom on the Art of Dying (2012)

Life, Death, Appearance, Help

“I have endowed everyone with a temperament of his own, given everyone an idiom of his own; so that what is praise for him is blame for thee, what is honey for him is poison for thee, what is light for him is fire for thee, what is rose for him is thorn for thee, what is good for him is evil for thee, what is beautiful for him is ugly for thee. In the people of Hindustan the idiom of Hindustan is praiseworthy; in the people of Sind, the idiom of Sind is praiseworthy. I do not see the outward and the speech; I see the inward and the state [of feeling]. For the heart is the substance and speech an accident. So, the accident is subservient, the substance is the [real] object. The religion of love stands apart from all religions. For lovers the [only] religion and creed is God.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

Rumi, quoted from Harsh Narain, Myths of Composite Culture and Equality of Religions (1990) p. 20-21 https://archive.org/details/MythOfCompositeCultureHarshNarain

Love, God, People, Religion

“The Labour Party has no objection whatever to the Germans practicing nazi-ism in Germany; that is their concern. We do not engage in any philisophic discussions with them about that system so long as they make no endeavour to foist it by force upon people outside their country. We stand for self-government. In the same way, we offer no opinions regarding the justification or non-justification of bolshevism in Russia; that is the concern of the Russian people. Their form of government is their own affair, just as our form of government is our affair. The Labour party believes in the right of peoples to govern themselves, and to enjoy a way of life which they themselves decide upon. We concede that right to Russia. We concede that right to Germany, and it is because we are claiming it for ourselves, and Germany denies it to us, that we are at war with Germany. (Speech to the Commonwealth House of Represenatives, 24 June 1941”

John Curtin

Hansard, page 286)

Life, War, People, Way

“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”

Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810–1889) English writer and poet

Of Discretion.
Proverbial Philosophy (1838-1849)

Silence, Time

“It is the Soldier, not the minister, who has given us freedom of religion.
It is the Soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the Soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us freedom to protest.
It is the Soldier, not the lawyer, who has given us the right to a fair trial.
It is the Soldier, not the politician, who has given us the right to vote.
It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
And whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.”

Charles Province

Published on the George Patton Historical Society http://www.pattonhq.com/koreamemorial.html website. Also attributed through reading in the U.S. House http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r108:FLD001:H01969. This poem is often attributed to Fr. Dennis Edward O'Brien. Father O'Brien apparently sent the poem to Dear Abbey, who incorrectly attributed it to him. Before his death, he was always quick to say that he had not written the verse.

Religion, Freedom

“Our first appreciation of music comes through the sounds of the mother, especially her voice and her lullaby. Our earliest musical expression, of which speech is a part, is in a sense a duet with her. And later in life we should still be able to discern the voice of love in the music.”

John Diamond (doctor) (1934) Australian doctor

Source: The Life Energy in Music, Vol. 1 (1981), p. 25

Love, Life, Music, Sense

“Captain Smith reached Virginia on April 26, 1607, with a number of English gentlemen and some people who were willing to work. Then they all held a meeting to discuss ways and means of civilizing everybody. They made a great many speeches and accused each other of various crimes and misdemeanors and arrested some of themselves as an object lesson, and American history was started at last.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody (1950), Part VI: Now We're Getting Somewhere, Captain John Smith

People, Way, History

“God speaks where his people gather and are free to be led. The marks of the validity of the conclusions they reach are to be sought not alone in the principles applied but in the procedure of the meeting. Were all free to speak? Was every speech heard and weighed?”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

Source: The Priestly Kingdom (1984), pp. 22-23

God, People

“Poetry begins as the divine speech of the bicameral mind. Then, as the bicameral mind breaks down, there remain prophets.”

Julian Jaynes book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Book III, Chapter 3, p. 374
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

“Discourse occurs at the silent level of the artefact and is continuously presenced in the world as such. It is a discourse which is not, and cannot be, articulated in speech.”

Christopher Tilley (1955) British postprocessual archaeologist.

[Buchli (Ed.), Victor, Christopher, Tilley, The Material Culture Reader, 2002, Berg, 1-85973-559-2, Oxford]

World

“I do recall one particular night shoot… We were called to the set at four o'clock in the afternoon. As usual, nothing was ready. They'd built a set of Tiberius's grotto, on three acres, and were assembling all of the extras and background. The producers worriedly asked if I would go into Peter's trailer (he was playing Tiberius) and go through the lines with him, which we did few times.
And then he told me the most remarkable story – whether it is true or not I have no idea – about his grave-robbing Etruscan tombs. He said the best way to find Etruscan jewellery and artefacts was to find the drains in the tombs, and very gingerly sift through them with your fingers because, as the bodies decompose, all of the artifacts deposit themselves into the channels. The thought of Peter O'Toole on his hands and knees in an Etruscan catacomb makes for a lovely image.
We spent hours and hours in this trailer. He was smoking … it certainly wasn't tobacco. By the time we got onto the set, 12 hours had passed. We couldn't believe our eyes: the set was covered with people engaging in every sexual perversion in the book. We were totally bemused.
Peter would start off his speech, "Rome was but a city…" then pause, look around, and say to me: "Are they doing the Irish jig over there?"”

Malcolm McDowell (1943) English actor

I'd look over and there would be two dwarves and an amputee dancing around some girls splayed out on a giant dildo. This went on quite a few times. As quoted in "Malcolm McDowell on Peter O'Toole: Caligula, catacombs and chicken gizzards" https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/dec/17/malcolm-mcdowell-peter-otoole-caligula-graves, The Guardian (17 December, 2013)

Love, People, Books, Way

“A little apish hat, couched fast to the pate, like an oyster;
French cambric ruffs, deep with a witness, starched to the purpose:
Delicate in speech; quaint in array; conceited in all points;
In courtly guiles, a passing singular odd man.”

Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604) English peer and courtier of the Elizabethan era

Source: About, Lines attributed to Gabriel Harvey by Thomas Nashe, said to have been written to ridicule Oxford.

“Women, he held, had never been treated with elementary justice. To worship them was no less unfair than to hold them in contempt. The honest man, in our day, should regard a woman without the least bias of sexual prejudice; should view her simply as a fellow-being, who, according to circumstances, might or not be on his own plane. Away with all empty show and form, those relics of barbarism known as chivalry! He wished to discontinue even the habit of hat-doffing in female presence. Was not civility preserved between man and man without such idle form? Why not, then, between man and woman? Unable, as yet, to go the entire length of his principles in every-day life, he endeavoured, at all events, to cultivate in his intercourse with women a frankness of speech, a directness of bearing, beyond the usual. He shook hands as with one of his own sex, spine uncrooked; he greeted them with level voice, not as one who addresses a thing afraid of sound. To a girl or matron whom he liked, he said, in tone if not in phrase, "Let us be comrades." In his opinion this tended notably to the purifying of the social atmosphere. It was the introduction of simple honesty into relations commonly marked — and corrupted — by every form of disingenuousness. Moreover, it was the great first step to that reconstruction of society at large which every thinker saw to be imperative and imminent.
But Constance Bride knew nothing of this, and in her ignorance could not but misinterpret the young man's demeanor. She felt it to be brusque; she imagined it to imply a purposed oblivion of things in the past.”

George Gissing (1857–1903) English novelist

Source: Our Friend the Charlatan (1901), Ch. II

Life, Women, Justice, Sex

“Dinner at the "Continental" to commemorate the great reform [the abolition of the serfdom in 1861]. Tedious and incongruous. To dine, drink champagne, make a racket, and deliver speeches about national consciousness, the conscience of the people, freedom, and such things, while slaves in tail-coats are running round your tables, veritable serfs, and your coachmen wait outside in the street, in the bitter cold—that is lying to the Holy Ghost.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Diary, 9 February 1897
Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

People, Lying, Drink, Freedom

“About the only power you have is the power to discriminate. Living in a culture like this, you have to make choices and search out what has the most authentic content or substance. In the 1960s, while on LSD, I realized that my mind was a garbage receptacle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole childhood absorbing so much crap that my personality and mind are saturated with it. God only knows if that affects you physically! As a kid I became increasingly interested in earlier periods of culture. I turned into a little nostalgia boy, and I became steeped in the Our Gang fantasy from watching them on TV. So much so, that my speech patterns were affected. The style of those Our Gang comedies was so charming that I started acting and talking like Jackie Cooper and Alfalfa. They had these cute kids, artificial mannerisms. It must have been embarrassing for people to hear me talk like that.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 60

God, People, Search, Boy

“The First Amendment is often inconvenient. But that is beside the point. Inconvenience does not absolve the government of its obligation to tolerate speech.”

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

International Society for Krishna Consciousness v. Lee, 505 U.S. 672 http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?navby=case&court=us&vol=505&invol=672 (concurring opinion) (26 June 1992).

“There is no single speech nor article in which it is not said that the purpose of all these orgies is the peace of Europe. At a dinner given by the representatives of French literature, all breathe of peace. M. Zola, who, a short time previously, had written that war was inevitable, and even serviceable; M. de Vogue, who more than once has stated the same in print, say, neither of them, a word as to war, but speak only of peace. The sessions of Parliament open with speeches upon the past festivities; the speakers mention that such festivities are an assurance of peace to Europe.
It is as if a man should come into a peaceful company, and commence energetically to assure everyone present that he has not the least intention to knock out anyone's teeth, blacken their eyes, or break their arms, but has only the most peaceful ideas for passing the evening.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Patriotism and Christianity http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Patriotism_and_Christianity (1896), Ch. 1

War, Peace, Literature, Idea

“[In the introduction to his Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Topics, Averroes said] This art has three parts. The first part sets forth the speeches from which dialectical conversation is composed — i. e., its parts, and the parts of its parts on to its simplest components. This part is found in the first treatise on Aristotle's book.
The second part sets forth the topics from which syllogisms are drawn — syllogisms for affirming something or denying it with respect to every kind of problem occurring in this art. This is the next six treatises of Aristotle's book
The third part set forth how The third part sets forth how the questioner ought to question and the answerer answer. It also sets forth how many kinds of questions and answers there are. This is in the eighth treatise of Aristotle's book.”

Averroes (1126–1198) Medieval Arab scholar and philosopher

Averroës, Charles Edwin Butterworth (1977) Averroës' Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle's "Topics,". p. 92

Books, Art, Question, Problem

“Without free speech no search for Truth is possible; without free speech no discovery of Truth is useful; without free speech progress is checked, and the nations no longer march forward towards the nobler life which the future holds for man. Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day; the denial slays the life of the people and entombs the hope of the race.”

Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891) British freethinker, and radical politician

Speech at Hall of Science c.1880 quoted in An Autobiography of Annie Besant; reported in Edmund Fuller, Thesaurus of Quotations (1941), p. 398; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
Attributed

Life, People, Truth, Hope

“Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Life, Death, Food, Home

“What language did these Macedones speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means highlanders, and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded […] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen's three sons - Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus-who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century, that the Macedones were a Greek speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive.”

N. G. L. Hammond (1907–2001) British classical scholar

"The Macedonian State" p.12-13)

Men, People, Family, Mountain

“What struck me most in this conversation was a radical passion for truthfulness in everything (which I came to know as a characteristic vogue among the young Viennese intellectuals of the generation immediately preceding mine only in the following university years). This truthfulness became almost a fashion in that border group between the purely Jewish and the purely Gentile parts of the intelligentsia in which I came so much to move. It meant much more than truth in speech. One had to "live" truth and not tolerate any pretence in oneself or others. It sometimes produced outright rudeness and, certainly, unpleasantness. Every convention was dissected and every conventional form exposed as fraud. Wittgenstein merely carried this further in applying it to himself. I sometimes felt that he took a perverse pleasure in discovering falsehood in his own feelings and that he was constantly trying to purge himself of all fraud.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 20. 1960s–1970s

Pleasure, Truth, Feeling, Fashion

“Now that the provost has instructed me on the criminal speech laws he apparently believes I have a proclivity (to break), despite knowing nothing about my speech, I see that he is guilty of promoting hatred against an identifiable group: conservatives. The provost simply believes and is publicizing his belief that conservatives are more likely to commit hate crimes in their speeches. Not only does this promote hatred against conservatives, but it promotes violence against conservatives.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Response to a letter from University of Ottawa provost Francois Houle to use "restraint, respect and consideration" in her planned address there (21 March 2010), as quoted in "Coulter: Canadian U Provost Guilty of Hate Crimes" at Newsmax (23 March 2010) http://newsmax.com/InsideCover/coulter-canada-provost-hate/2010/03/23/id/353652. 2010

Hate, Law

“To preserve our freedoms from the encroachments of Islam, we must do four things: defend freedom of speech, reject cultural relativism, counter Islamization, and cherish our national identity.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 13, p. 213

Freedom

“All the big powers…they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

Quoted in "Between the dying and the dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian's life and the battle to Legalize Euthanasia"‎ - Page 247 - by Neal Nicol, Harry Wylie - 2006
2000s, 2006

Silence

“Art is not hysteria. Art is as natural to man as is thought, it is a normal function of his brain. Art is observation and consciousness. It is not an instinct, vague, indecisive, sickly. Art is an eternal source – life, and an unlimited expression, the individual. These two elements, well-adapted, make masterpieces... All speech that a human being finds to give a new impression is of art. Why believe that the speech must be epileptic to become art?... Such is art. It is the product of life and the individual. It is born from their clash, from the received impression. But this impression is made once, for then it is no longer, neither life nor the individual..”

Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938) expressionist painter

Vol. 1: 'My beautiful One, My Unique!', pp. 130-140
1895 - 1905, Lettres à un Inconnu, 1901 – 1905; Museo Communale, Ascona

Life, Art, Nature, Indecision

“In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility… Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? Will the computer raise egocentrism to the status of a virtue?”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)

Peace, Communication, Problem, Sense

“A bunch of bong-smoking, America-bashing, flag-burning, yoga-posing, incense-burning, dolphin-saving, salmon-eating hypocrites. These are the sensitive, liberal people who are always yelling about people's freedom of speech and expression, unless you happen to say something that pisses them off.”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

On the left wing
A Big, Steaming Pile Of Me

People, Freedom

“We are carrying into the next decade many unresolved problems raised by Vietnam. How can a democracy such as ours defend its interests at acceptable cost and continue to enjoy the freedom of speech and behavior to which we are accustomed in time of peace? To a Communist enemy the Cold War is a total, unending conflict with the United States and its allies- without formal military hostilities, to be sure- but conducted with the same discipline and determination as a formal war. Unless we can learn to exercise some degree of self-discipline, to accept and enforce some reasonable standard of responsible civic conduct, and to remove the many self-created obstacles to the use of our power, we will be unable to meet the hard competition waiting for us in the decade of the 1970s.”

Maxwell D. Taylor (1901–1987) United States general

Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 408

Hostility, War, Peace, Behavior

“Free speech means being able to express an honest opinion—in case you didn't know—and my honest opinion is that Wahhabi Islam is such an obvious mental affliction, that science ought to be looking for a cure. It's a truly horrible, heartless and cruel ideology that despises human kind, especially the female half, and I believe its presence on this planet is a stain on all humanity; and when it finally passes, as one day it surely must, because nothing that unnatural and inhuman could possibly last forever, its memory will linger like a bad smell, as a warning for generations to come; like a ghostly gibbet by the roadside of history, a bony finger of death, beckoning us back to a more brutal and primitive past. It'll serve as a grim reminder of what happens to human beings when religion is allowed to go too far.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Can I say this?" (27 May 2012) http://youtube.com/watch?v=nlhxadPHt4s · transcript http://dotsub.com/view/d1843b5a-19d8-4bd0-8e91-2b84ee780b61/viewTranscript/eng 2012

Death, Religion, History, Affliction

“You’re frightfully BBC in your language this afternoon, Albert,’ said Tuppance, with some exasperation.
Albert looked slightly taken aback and reverted to a more natural form of speech.
‘I was listening to a very interesting talk on pond life last night,’ he explained.”

Agatha Christie book N or M?

N or M? (1941)

Life, Nature, Night

“The church and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom; one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free thought, free speech, free men.”

Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) American abolitionist, writer

Source: Woman, Church and State (1893), p. 540 as quoted in K. M. Talreja, Holy Vedas and Holy Bible: A Comparative Study https://books.google.com/books?id=9qkoAAAAYAAJ, New Delhi: Rashtriya Chetana Sangathan, 2000

Men, God, Freedom

“We are offered silence, free speech is all but dead in Europe. We live in a post free speech era, the attacks on Charlie Hebdo have proven that to the whole world.”

Tommy Robinson (1982) English right-wing activist

'Do not let Germany be dragged back to chaos and destruction': EDL founder Tommy Robinson speaks to 40,000 strong crowd at the Pegida anti-immigrant rally in Germany http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3279659/German-far-right-activists-accuse-Angela-Merkel-treason-hold-night-time-floodlit-rally-Dresden-mark-anniversary-anti-immigrant-group.html, Daily Mail (19 October 2015) 2015

World, Silence, Dead

“I do not propose to say many words tonight. The time has come when action rather than speech is required. Eighteen months ago in this House I prayed that the responsibility might not fall upon me to ask this country to accept the awful arbitrament of war. I fear that I may not be able to avoid that responsibility. But, at any rate, I cannot wish for conditions in which such a burden should fall upon me in which I should feel clearer than I do to-day as to where my duty lies…We shall stand at the bar of history knowing that the responsibility for this terrible catastrophe lies on the shoulders of one man—the German Chancellor, who has not hesitated to plunge the world into misery in order to serve his own senseless ambitions.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1939/sep/01/british-note-to-germany in the House of Commons (1 September 1939) on the British ultimatum to Germany Prime Minister

War, World, Fear, Feeling

“I don’t know where to begin my speech. I don’t know what people would be expecting me to say, but first of all thank you to God for whom we are equal and thank you to every person who has prayed for my fast recovery and new life.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

UN speech, June 2013

Life, God, People, Personality

“Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realization that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant—at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing.”

Stephen R. Lawhead (1950) American writer

Source: The Skin Map (2010), p. 212

Confidence

“The First Amendment expresses our Nation’s fundamental commitment to religious liberty by means of two provisions–one protecting the free exercise of religion, the other barring establishment of religion. They were written by the descendents of people who had come to this land precisely so that they could practice their religion freely. Together with the other First Amendment guarantees–of free speech, a free press, and the rights to assemble and petition–the Religion Clauses were designed to safeguard the freedom of conscience and belief that those immigrants had sought. They embody an idea that was once considered radical: Free people are entitled to free and diverse thoughts, which government ought neither to constrain nor to direct.”

Sandra Day O'Connor (1930) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, 545 U.S. 844 (2005) (concurring).

People, Religion, Exercises, Idea

“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

God, Childhood

“Greed is good. Taken from Ivan Boesky’s speech saying ‘Greed is right.’… Gekko says he wrecks it ‘because it is wreckable.’ There is an impulse in Gekko to take, to rape…. Kirk Kerkorian destroyed MGM and UA…. Buy both companies and destroy both. And that was the end of the movie business. UA and MGM were two great film companies. Suddenly they were one lousy company. Kerkorian did it for the money, like Gekko. He didn’t care about film. Never. He sold it off in pieces. He cannibalized it. Just like Gekko. These guys do what suits their short-term.”

Oliver Stone (1946) American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Wall Street DVD Director’s Commentary (2000)

Money, Guy, Business

“All writers are conventional, because all writers have the same problem of transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination. For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School

People, Imagination, Literature, Problem

“I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her — in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment… Equal opportunity feminism, which I espouse, demands the removal of all barriers to woman's advance in the political and professional world — but not at the price of special protections for women which are infantilizing and anti-democratic.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. ix

Women, World, Girl

“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, "I hear you spoke here tonight." "Oh, it was nothing," I replied modestly. "Yes," the little old lady nodded, "that's what I heard."”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Humor and the Presidency (1987).
1980s

“Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Art, Way

“I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.”

Lucy Stone (1818–1893) American abolitionist and suffragist

The Progress of Fifty Years (1893)

Women, Thinking, Gratitude

“It is yet a higher speech of his than the other, “It is true greatness to have in one the frailty of a man and the security of a god.””

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Adversity
Essays (1625)

God

“Playing bass for Metallica is like having free speech in Cuba.”

Robert Trujillo (1964) American bassist known for his role as the current bassist of Metallica

Unsourced

“The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'. But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.”

T. E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom

My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.
Source: Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), Ch. 3

World, Dogs, Way, Flowers

“I, Robert Joseph Dole, do solemnly swear… Sorry. Wrong speech.”

Bob Dole (1923) American politician

Remarks by the President and Senator Robert Dole at Presentation of Medal of Freedom to Senator Dole http://clinton6.nara.gov/1997/01/1997-01-17-president-in-dole-medal-of-freedom-presentation.html (January 17, 1997).

“William Shakespeare has probably done more to damage the cultural worth of Britain than anyone else in the whole of human history. After endlessly having to study his plays on the school curriculum, generations of children have ventured into adulthood convinced that all literature is coma-inducingly dreary. I don't blame them. Portia's speech about the 'gentle rain' is in no way as stimulating as 10 minutes of Grand Theft Auto. I believe that Shakespeare, along with Milton, Donne and Chaucer, has a place in modern Britain. And that place is deep in the bowels of the British Library, where he can be studied by hardcore language students.”

Jeremy Clarkson (1960) English broadcaster, journalist and writer

Source: For Crying Out Loud! The World According to Clarkson Volume Three (2008), p. 21

Children, School, Way, History

“The concept of ideographic writing is a most seductive notion. There is great appeal in the concept of written symbols conveying their message directly to our minds, thus bypassing the restrictive intermediary of speech. And it seems so plausible. Surely ideas immediately pop into our minds when we see a road sign, a death's head label on a bottle of medicine, a number on a clock. Aren't Chinese characters a sophisticated system of symbols that similarly convey meaning without regard to sound? Aren't they an ideographic system of writing? The answer to these questions is no. Chinese characters are a phonetic, not an ideographic, system of writing… Here I would go further: There never has been, and never can be, such a thing as an ideographic system of writing.”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 133) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

Death, Idea, Question

“She can find in her bewilderment no words wherewith to begin, how to order or where to end her speech; fain would she pour out all in her first utterance, but not even the first words doth fear-stricken shame allow her.”
Nec quibus incipiat demens videt ordine nec quo quove tenus, prima cupiens effundere voce omnia, sed nec prima pudor dat verba timenti.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 433–435

Fear

“Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech, and you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.”

Mitchell Baker (1959) Chairwoman; former CEO

cnet.com: "Mozilla CEO Eich resigns after gay-marriage controversy" 3 Apr 2014 http://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-ceo-eich-resigns-after-controversy/; on the resignation of Brendan Eich, 3 April 2014:

Freedom, Time, Fight

“"I’d give "anything" for freedom from The State, provided "anything" is a figure of speech (no limbs, eyes, etc.)"”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

2010s, 2016

Freedom

“One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. …the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon… It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. …it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.”

George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962) Historian

A Shortened History of England (1959)

Life, People

“For thought and speech are of a thinking and speaking subject, and if the life of the latter depends on the performance of a superimposed function, it depends on fulfilling the requirements of this function — thus it depends on those who control these requirements.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 128

Life, Thinking, Dependency

“Though brutal and bombastic, and dripping with venom against the Czech state and especially against the Czech President, the Fuehrer's speech, made to a delirious mass of Nazi fanatics gathered in the huge stadium on the last night of the party rally, was not a declaration of war. He reserved his decision -- publicly at least, for, as we know from the captured German documents, he had already set October 1 for the attack across the Czech frontier. He simply demanded that the Czech government give "justice" to the Sudeten Germans. If it didn't, Germany would have to see to it that it did.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

War, Justice, Decision, Night

“Classical mechanics is mathematical not only in the sense that it makes use of mathematical terms and methods for abbreviating arguments which might, if necessary, also be expressed in the language of everyday speech; it is so also in the much more stringent sense that its basic concepts are mathematical concepts, that mechanics itself is a mathematics.”

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis (1892–1965) Dutch historian

Source: The mechanization of the world picture, 1961, p. 499

Mathematics, Sense

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

"Unappreciated Shakespeare", Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Christmas Number, 9 December 1882.

“Everything depends on our succeeding in making the government firm and keeping it firm; whether it pleases us or not, there is nothing else and whoever can, should help. Who is unable to do so, or cannot bring himself to do it, should at least not disturb. But that is done by stupid newspaper articles which publicize the many weaknesses and ridiculous traits of the republic. That is also done by resolutions and speeches against the military decrees which emanate from the officers' side. It is very easy to say 'This is unheard of', and then to do nothing; it is very difficult to try to find usable timber among the ruins. Politics is the art of the possible, not what is desirable. My world looks different from that of to-day; but I will try and help that the two of us and another few Germans can live in the world of the future. To achieve this will be difficult enough, if it can be achieved.”

Hans von Seeckt (1866–1936) German general

Letter to Mrs Seeckt (12 February 1919), quoted in F. L. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics 1918 to 1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 31-32.

Stupidity, World, Art, Future

“I find the speech in this case patently offensive, hateful, and insulting. The Court should not, however, gloss over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives because it is confronted with speech it does not like.”

Sonia Sotomayor (1954) U.S. Supreme Court Justice

Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002) (dissenting).

Hate, Freedom

“A speech is entertaining only when serenely detached from all information.”

Henry Fountain Ashurst (1874–1962) United States Senator from Arizona

"The Silver-Tongued Sunbeam" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,848048,00.html. Time (August 7, 1939)

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Fate, Truth, Faith, Exercises

““Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.”

William S. Burroughs book Naked Lunch

Benway
Naked Lunch (1959)

Children, Jerk, Silence, Singing

“Must one go through the five official stages? What are those five stages again: "anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance." Well, back up: here comes my acceptance speech. "I am now, and I have always been a flaming faggot, responsible for style in its every manifestation. I have my own five steps: flippancy, sentimentality, sarcasm, camp, and smut. They've got me through life, and deity dammit, they'll get me through death!"”

Robert Patrick (playwright) (1937) Playwright, poet, lyricist, short story writer, novelist

Pouf Positive
Untold Decades: Seven Comedies of Gay Romance (1988)

Life, Death, Anger

“Thank God for the mind. It's the only place where we have freedom of speech.”

Charles Reis Felix (1923–2017) American writer

Page 125
Crossing the Sauer: a memoir of World War II (2002)

God, Freedom

“Scientific language that is correct and serious so far as teachers and students are concerned must follow these stylistic norms:
# Be as verbally explicit and universal as possible…. The effect is to make `proper' scientific statements seem to talk only about an unchanging universal realm….
# Avoid colloquial forms of language and use, even in speech, forms close to those of written language. Certain words mark language as colloquial…, as does use of first and second person…
# Use technical terms in place of colloquial synonyms or paraphrases….
# Avoid personification and use of specifically or usually human attributes or qualities…, human agents or actors, and human types of action or process…
# Avoid metaphoric and figurative language, especially those using emotional, colorful, or value laden words, hyperboles and exaggeration, irony, and humorous or comic expressions.
# Be serious and dignified in all expression of scientific content. Avoid sensationalism.
# Avoid personalities and reference to individual human beings and their actions, including (for the most part) historical figures and events….
# Avoid reference to fiction or fantasy.
# Use causal forms of explanation and avoid narrative and dramatic accounts…. Similarly forbidden are dramatic forms, including dialogue, the development of suspense or mystery, the element of surprise, dramatic action, and so on.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 133-134, as cited in: Mary U. Hanrahan, "Applying CDA to the analysis of productive hybrid discourses in science classrooms." (2002).

Color, Teachers, Universe, Parting

“This [Journalism] is not a profession of my choice. Nor is it family traditional occupation. God must have created this profession as a fit theater for all my struggles…Whatever I have written so far is about politics or philosophy, literature, music, poetry or even speeches I made either in the floor of assembly or from public-platforms-all these in a way touch one aspect of journalism or the other”

D. V. Gundappa (1887–1975) Indian writer

In page=18
D.V. Gundappa,Sahitya Akademi

God, Family, Music, Way

“When it comes to critical questions of religion, freedom of conscience, belief and speech is a paper tiger in Nigeria. In fact, religion is presented as inadmissible of criticism, of opposing views and opinions whether it is the status of women, of children, gay, or of non-believers. Religious positions are cast on stones. Views that are critical of religion easily get framed as blasphemy, which is a crime under Sharia law and is punishable by death or imprisonment.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

Death, Women, Children, Religion

“Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that makes me wonder why I ever agreed to speak at all; the Tomb and the Conqueror Worm seem preferable to delivering the stupid and piffling speech I have so carefully prepared.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

One Half of Robertson Davies (1989).

Stupidity, Way, Confidence, Suffering

“Mossadeq, the orator, is difficult to judge as a politician because of the perpetual contradictions between his words and his acts, and because of his sudden changes of mood from elation to depression before one's very eyes. His absolute certainty, violently expressed in hysterical speeches, would turn to tears and sobbing. He had frequent "diplomatic" illensses and he played out macabre comedies in which he would exclaim: "I am a-dying…" and so forth. He has been compared to Robespierre, to Renzi and even to characters from the Commedia dell' Arte.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

Page 53
Publications, The Shah's Story (1980), On world leaders and statesmen

Art, Mood, Tear, Change

“Some characteristic expressions he used rather frequently in everyday speech can be seen in letters in his own hand, in which he sometimes writes, when he wants to say that certain men will never pay: "they'll pay on the Greek Kalends." And when he wants to encourage his addressee to put up with present circumstances whatever they are, he says: "Let us be satisfied with the Cato we have."”
Cotidiano sermone quaedam frequentius et notabiliter usurpasse eum, litterae ipsius autographae ostentant, in quibus identidem, cum aliquos numquam soluturos significare vult, "ad Kalendas Graecas soluturos" ait; et cum hortatur ferenda esse praesentia, qualiacumque sint: "contenti simus hoc Catone".

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Source: The Twelve Caesars, Augustus, Ch. 87

Men

“More than all, the citizen and his representative in Congress in time of war must maintain his right of free speech. More than in times of peace it is necessary that the channels for free public discussion of governmental policies shall be open and unclogged.”

Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician

Free Speech in Wartime (October 6, 1917)

War, Peace, Time

“You're not bloody Aristophanes, and the people who are paying for tickets are not educated Athenians. We're acting for turnips who only come to talk to their cousins and fart. We have to give them a lot of action and low-level jokes, but you can leave all that to us on stage. We know what's required. Your job is to hone the basic framework and remember the simple motto: short speeches, short lines, short words.”

Lindsey Davis book Last Act in Palmyra

Last Act in Palmyra

People, Education

“Atheist is really ʺa thoroughly honest, unambiguous term,ʺ it admits of no paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear‐cut issues and unambiguous speech.”

Chapman Cohen (1868–1954) British atheist and secularist writer and lecturer

Theism Or Atheism: The Great Alternative (1921), Chapter XIII: Agnosticism.

World

“All poetry is the reproduction of the tones of speech”

Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977) American poet

Modern American Poetry 1950

“Let me say
and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

The Silence.
Poems

Death, World, Singing

“Speech is a mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.”

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 1073
Sentences, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave

Soul

“[interpersonal meaning] embodies all use of language to express social and personal relations, including all forms of the speaker's intrusion into the speech situation and the speech act.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Explorations in the functions of language, 1973, p. 41 cited in: Sin-wai Chan (2004) A dictionary of translation technology. p. 113.

Personality

“It is not proper either to have a blunt sword or to use freedom of speech ineffectually.
Neither is the sun to be taken from the world, nor freedom of speech from erudition.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in the translation of Thomas Taylor (1818)
Florilegium

World, Freedom, Sun

“The thing about free speech and free expression is people that are interested in it are by their very nature always tending to explore the boundaries…In a society that prizes free expression and one that has a great premium upon the marketplace of ideas, it's hard to say that someone went too far in expressing themselves when really no harm was done.”

Jay Leiderman (1971) lawyer

As mentioned on Huffington Post article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121005/us-anonymous-man-arrested/

People, Idea, Nature

“Our speech has ceased to speak, it shouts; it says cute, not beautiful, colossal, not great; it cannot find the right word any more, because the word is no longer the designation of an object, but the echo of some kind of gossip about the object.”

Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist

“Zum Unterrichtsgesetze,” as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 31

Beauty

“You cannot take away freedom to protect it, you cannot destroy the free market to save it, and you cannot uphold freedom of speech by silencing those with whom you disagree. To take rights away to defend them or to spend your way out of debt defies common sense.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Reshaping and Redefining of America
Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine
2009-06-16
Threshold Editions
1439168571
17
2000s, 2009

Way, Sense, Freedom, Silence

“If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people’s lives are better, you know it’s hard and some people think it’s boring. Speeches like this are fun. Actually doing the work is hard. So people say, well, we need to change. She’s been around a long time, she sure has, and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better.”

Bill Clinton (1946) 42nd President of the United States

2010s, (July 26, 2016)

People, Thinking, Change, Time

“I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate… I do not blame Penguin Books, India. Other publishers have just quietly withdrawn other books without making the effort that Penguin made to save this book [The Hindus: An Alternative History]. Penguin, India, took this book on knowing that it would stir anger in the Hindutva ranks, and they defended it in the courts for four years, both as a civil and as a w:Lawsuitcriminal suit. They were finally defeated by the true villain of this piece – the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

Wendy Doniger, In: India: PEN protests withdrawal of best-selling book http://fleursdumal.nl/mag/category/news-events/page/12, Fleursdumal.org Her book [The Hindus: An Alternative History] became controversial and Dinanath Batra of Shiksha Bachao Andolan filed a case against the publisher, claiming that the book was offensive to Hindus and therefore in violation of Section 295A of the Indian penal code which prohibits ‘deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.'

Books, Law, Disappointment, History

“A final argument for broad freedom of expression is its effect on the character of individuals in a society. Citizens in a free society must have courage — the courage to hear not only unwelcome political speech but novel and shocking ideas in science and the arts.”

Anthony Lewis book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate

[186, Anthony, Lewis, w:Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment, Basic Books, 2007, 0465039170]

Art, Idea, Courage, Freedom

“Yesterday, on the 17th of May, we Norwegians celebrated our constitution day to mark the signing of Norway's constitution in 1814. Maybe it is because we are a small country: In Norway this is an important day. All over Norway children have paraded in their best clothes to the music of thousands of marching bands, and countless speeches have been made to remind each others, as fellow Norwegians, that freedom should never be taken for granted.”

Andreas Heldal-Lund (1964) Norwegian activist

Award Winner's Speech http://www.leipzig-award.org/englisch/rede_preistraeger_2003.htm, Leipzig Human Rights Award, 2003 Leipzig Human Rights Award of the European-American Citizens Committee for Human Rights and Religious Freedom in the USA, (May 18, 2003).

Children, Music, Freedom, Clothes

“It is due to him that the Roman concepts of public duty and service are still a living force among us. Historians have denied him the name of genius which they grant readily to Alexander and Julius and Napoleon; but if it be not genius to re-make and re-direct the world by a courageous realism and supreme powers of character and mind, then the word has no meaning in human speech..”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Augustus (1937)

World, Courage

“I think this country allows you freedom of speech. Anybody should be allowed to say whatever they want. When you’re in my business, you can’t talk about [conservative] politics. You just can’t. You’re attacked viciously in a way that I’ve never been attacked before.”

Antonio Sabàto Jr. (1972) American actor and model

Antonio Sabato Jr. Says Hollywood is Blacklisting Him for Supporting Donald Trump http://variety.com/2016/film/news/antonio-sabato-jr-blacklisted-for-supporting-donald-trump-republican-1201829791/ (August 3, 2016)

Way, Business, Thinking, Freedom

“What is new poetry? The difference is not mere details of form, measure rhyme schemes or diction, but a return to contemporary speech, thought, imagination and spiritual life, coupled with oriental (Japan & China) and cosmopolitan influences, and a direction of vision, with perfection of form and delicacy of feeling.”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

The New Poetry -An anthology ed Monroe & Henderson Macmillan 1918
The New Poetry (1918)

Life, Feeling, Imagination, Perfection

“Not all monotheisms are exactly the same, at the moment. They're all based on the same illusion, they're all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity. I am talking about militant Islam. Globally it's a gigantic power. It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states, with an enormous fortune it's pumping the ideologies of wahhabism and salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young in its madrassas, training people in violence, making a cult of death and suicide and murder. That's what it does globally, it's quite strong. In our societies it poses as a cringing minority, whose faith you might offend, who deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need. Now, it makes quite large claims for itself, doesn't it? It says it's the Final Revelation. It says that God spoke to one illiterate businessman – in the Arabian Peninsula – three times through an archangel, and that the resulted material, which as you can see as you read it is largely plagiarized ineptly from the Old…and The New Testament, is to be accepted as the Final Revelation and as the final and unalterable one, and that those who do not accept this revelation are fit to be treated as cattle infidels, potential chattel, slaves and victims. Well I tell you what, I don't think Muhammad ever heard those voices. I don't believe it. And the likelihood that I am right – as opposed to the likelihood that a businessman who couldn't read, had bits of the Old and The New Testament re-dictated to him by an archangel, I think puts me much more near the position of being objectively correct. But who is the one under threat? The person who promulgates this and says I'd better listen because if I don't I'm in danger, or me who says "no, I think this is so silly you can even publish a cartoon about it"? And up go the placards and the yells and the howls and the screams – this is in London, this is in Toronto, this is in New York, it's right in our midst now – "Behead those who cartoon Islam". Do they get arrested for hate speech? No. Might I get in trouble for saying what I just said about the prophet Muhammad? Yes, I might. Where are your priorities ladies and gentlemen? You're giving away what is most precious in your own society, and you're giving it away without a fight, and you're even praising the people who want to deny you the right to resist it. Shame on you why you do this. Make the best use of the time you've got left. This is really serious. … Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred, is also the main caller for censorship.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyoOfRog1EM&feature=youtu.be&t=16m36s
"Be It Resolved: Freedom of Speech Includes the Freedom to Hate", 15/11/2006.
2000s, 2006

Death, Women, God, Hate

“I am here to speak on freedom of speech. It is a great topic, and I am going to make my speech as free as possible. But you know that this cannot be done, for when anyone announces that he is going to speak his mind freely, everyone is frightened. This shows that there is no such thing as true freedom of speech. No one can afford to let his neighbors know what he is thinking about them. Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

" Of Freedom of Speech http://books.google.com/books?id=OM4eT2epYzwC&q=&quot;Society+can+exist+only+on+the+basis+that+there+is+some+amount+of+polished+lying+and+that+no+one+says+exactly+what+he+thinks&quot;&pg=PA95#v=onepage", lecture given in China (4 March 1933)

Lying, Thinking, Freedom

“My beloved children, who are the pupils of my eye—Truth is silent. If Truth has dawned within you, then there will be no further speech. It is silence, and silence is the greatest Truth, the best question. If there is no Truth, then there will be a lot of talk and questions. One is good and the other is bad. If there is good within you, there will be no further noise within. But if you are full of bad, there will be so much of talk, speeches and questions. Therefore, seek the good. God does not make a noise. If you need anything, then you will have only to knock, and if you are tuned to that point, with the sound of that knock you will get an answer immediately. No noise, you don't have to make a sound. This is the Truth.”

Bawa Muhaiyaddeen (1900–1986) Sri Lankan Sufi leader

God, His Prophets, and His Children (1976)

God, Children, Truth, Question

“Ancient Indians had a far deeper confidence in living speech than in the moral, impersonal and derivative written communication. When words issued from the mouth of a sayer, they carried a personal endorsement.”

Robert T. Oliver (1909–2000) American academic

Communication and Culture In Ancient India & China (1971)

Confidence, Communication, Personality

“You say the right hon. baronet [Peel] is a traitor. It would ill become me to attempt his defence after the speech which he delivered last night—a speech, I will venture to say, more powerful and more to be admired than any speech which has been delivered within the memory of any man in this House. I watched the right hon. baronet as he went home last night, and for the first time I envied him his feelings. That speech was circulated by scores of thousands throughout the kingdom and throughout the world; and wherever a man is to be found who loves justice, and wherever there is a labourer whom you have trampled under foot, that speech will bring joy to the heart of the one, and hope to the breast of the other. You chose the right hon. baronet—why? Because he was the ablest man of your party. You always said so, and you will not deny it now. Why was he the ablest? Because he had great experience, profound attainments, and an honest regard for the good of the country. You placed him in office. When a man is in office he is not the same man as when in opposition. The present generation, or posterity, does not deal as mildly with men in government as with those in opposition. There are such things as the responsibilities of office. Look at the population of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and there is not a man among you who would have the valour to take office and raise the standard of Protection, and cry, "Down with the Anti-Corn Law League, and Protection for ever!" There is not a man in your ranks who would dare to sit on that bench as the Prime Minister of England pledged to maintain the existing law. The right hon. baronet took the only, the truest course—he resigned. He told you by that act: "I will no longer do your work. I will not defend your cause. The experience I have had since I came into office renders it impossible for me at once to maintain office and the Corn Laws."”

John Bright (1811–1889) British Radical and Liberal statesman

The right hon. baronet resigned—he was then no longer your Minister. He came back to office as the Minister of his Sovereign and of the people.
Speech in the House of Commons (17 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 148.
1840s

Love, Men, People, World

“[Being peppered with invitations to travel far and wide to give lectures] has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Dagens Nyheter http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/an-exclusive-interview-with-j-m-coetzee interview with David Attwell (December 8, 2003)

People, World, Travel, Thinking

“Just at the age 'twixt boy and youth,
When thought is speech, and speech is truth.”

Walter Scott Marmion

Canto II, introduction.
Marmion (1808)

Truth, Youth, Age, Boy

“It's like unison, "Welcome to speech therapy, all together!"…"NAOOOOOOOOOOOWWW!"”

Lee Evans (1964) English stand-up comedian and actor

Live at Her Majesty's Theatre (1994)

“To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

Way

“I'm not for profiling people on the color of their skin, or on their religion, but I would take into account where they've been traveling and perhaps, you might have to indirectly take into account whether or not they've been going to radical political speeches by religious leaders. It wouldn't be that they are Islamic. But if someone is attending speeches from someone who is promoting the violent overthrow of our government, that's really an offense that we should be going after — they should be deported or put in prison.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

The Sean Hannity Show
Radio
2011-04-27 quoted in * Rand Paul, Supposed Defender Of Civil Liberties, Calls For Jailing People Who Attend ‘Radical Political Speeches’
Alex
Seitz-Wald
2011-05-31
ThinkProgress
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/05/31/232182/rand-paul-criminalize-speech/
2011-06-02
2010s

People, Religion, Color, Travel

Quotes about speech page 10

Quotes about speech
page 10