Quotes About Speech

I am thankful for all the complaining I hear about our government because it means we have freedom of speech.

She wondered if she should have explained herself more clearly. She could not explain herself at all. There were no words, no permitted words, to explain anything that she wanted to say. All the words that could have communicated it had been banned, not only from her mouth but even from her mind. She was reduced to mere actions, which are both more and less than words.

It is astonishing what power words have over men.

When I teach a class, I want the students to be "writing down the bones," the essential, awake speech of their minds. But I also know I can't just say, "Okay, write clearly and with great honesty." In class we try different techniques or methods. Eventually, the students hit the mark, come home to what they need to say and how they need to say it.

Can someone within that society walk into the town square and say what they want without fear of being punished for his or her views? If so, then that society is a free society. If not, it is a fear society.

I listen to Alicia practice a speech for class, and I don't look at the clock even once. In fact, for the next week, I take my time with

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Then he will talk—good gods! how he will talk!

quand il parle, ses mots s'apparentent à des perles enfilées sur un fil de soie ... quand il parle, il est comme le lustre répandu par un rubis ... quand il parle, c'est comme des éclaboussures de cristal qui fendent le bleu ....

Permissiveness cannot sustain true liberty for long. . . . In Sodom they probably had absolute free speech, but nothing worth saying! On the other hand, an otherwise permissive society, which tolerates almost everything, usually will not tolerate speech that challenges its iniquity. Evil is always intolerantly preoccupied with its own perpetuation.

A persistent preoccupation with "freedom of speech" to the neglect of other freedoms can diminish the shelter available for religion and other precious freedoms. The intertwining of all our freedoms is greater than we realize. . . . It may be true . . . that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had absolute free speech, but did they have anything worth saying?

The current total of countries in the world with First Amendments is one. You have guaranteed freedom of speech. Other countries don't have that.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.

although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.

other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing.

Los tiranos siempre han confiado, y lo hacen aún, en la censura. Después de todo éste es el tributo que los tiranos pagan por suponer que el público conoce la diferencia entre el discurso serio y el entretenimiento, y que le importa.

We Americans pride ourselves on our freedom to speak, to say what we believe. But of what use is it to speak if only those who already agree with us listen? A first step toward the abolition of war is learning to listen with respect and sympathy.

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.

The individual's inner speech and actions attract the conditions of his life.

Everything in the world bears witness of the use or misuse of man's inner talking.

El habla es una imagen de la mente y la mente es una imagen de Dios. - Hermética, traducción W. Scott.

The circumstances and conditions of life are outpictured inner talking, solidified sound. Inner speech calls events into existence. In every event is the creative sound that is its life and being. All that a man believes and consents to as true reveals itself in his inner speech. It is his word, his life.

It's a curious thing that when one speaks from the heart it is invariably in the worst of taste.