Speech Quotes

He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.

~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said]

~ Mark Logue

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Every St. Patrick's Day every Irishman goes out to find another Irishman to make a speech to.

~ Shane Leslie

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

~ Ferdinand De Saussure

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating.

~ Jarvis Cocker

For computer communications, computers talk in little bursts. They're not continuous like speech.

~ Bob Kahn

Private religious speech can't be discriminated against. It has to be treated equally with secular speech.

~ Samuel Alito

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Lately I've been believing that music predates speech.

~ Debbie Harry

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

~ Lev Vygotsky

Expressive speech, with modulation in pitch and volume, and a minimum of noticeable pauses, boosts credibility and enhances the impression of intelligence.

~ Leonard Mlodinow

Someday we'll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation.

~ Frank Rich

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.

~ Thomas Carlyle

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

~ Herbert Hoover

Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far.

~ Louis Farrakhan

A lot of our leadership has become acutely aware of speaking more fairly, of speaking more balanced, of recognizing that hate speech in any form, even if it comes out of emotional anger, is dangerous.

~ Hamza Yusuf

Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.

~ Alice Hamilton

America needs jobs, smaller government, less spending and a president with the courage to offer more than yet another speech.

~ Rick Perry

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

~ Adam Smith

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

~ Zhuangzi

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.

~ Andrew Lansley

You can't trust politicians. It doesn't matter who makes a political speech. It's all lies - and it applies to any rock star who wants to make a political speech as well.

~ Bob Geldof

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

~ John Wesley Powell

It seems obvious that if a species has the brainpower for speech, along with the sort of appendages that can manipulate a pair of pliers, it will eventually blunder into science, technology, and radio.

~ Seth Shostak

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

Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.

~ Hugo Black

Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn't just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea - I hate the government, the government is unjust, whatever.

~ Antonin Scalia

Money is speech. It's incongruous to say a multimillionaire can spend as much on his own campaign as he wants, but you can only give $2,300. His free speech rights are different from yours, thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. It's absurd.

~ Roger Stone

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

~ Joseph Brodsky

Poetry is a form of necessary speech... I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements of poetry.

~ Edward Hirsch

The line is a way of framing poetry. All verse is measured by lines. The poetic line immediately announces its difference from everyday speech and prose.

~ Edward Hirsch

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

~ Edward Hirsch

The Eyemo was heavy and could be noisy. Once, I was in an auditorium filming a speech made by Goebbels when, suddenly, it decided to emit a huge snarling sound. Goebbels froze, and hundreds of uniformed Brownshirts turned and glared at me in anger. It was not a comfortable moment.

~ Douglas Slocombe

Whoever thinks that he alone has speech, or possesses speech or mind above others, when unfolded such men are seen to be empty.

~ Sophocles

Free speech has been used by the Supreme Court to give immense power to the wealthiest members of our society.

~ Noam Chomsky

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour.

~ Tom Stoppard

We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it.

~ Yishan Wong

The most terrifying thing in the world was having to give a speech at my girlfriend's wedding. I was physically shaking and sweating the entire time.

~ Lindy Booth