Quotes About Speech

A bird that you set free may be caught again, but a word that escapes your lips will not return.

What you don't see with your eyes, don't invent with your mouth.

The Confederacy's newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution "rested upon the assumption of the equality of races," Stephens said

But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged...it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

One Republican said, "I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth," even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he "disagreed with almost all of it.

the restriction of speech by social media platforms was not yet a well-known phenomenon.

Freedom of expression in Athens, as readers well know, was not without limits: the vote to convict Socrates may have been democratic, but it nonetheless resulted in the ultimate silencing of his speech.

The result? An increasingly stratified online world in which the rules about what we can say are determined by a motley crew of elected officials and non-elected elites, some of whom have alarmingly close ties to government.

One particular Facebook policy, which the company has dubbed the "newsworthiness exemption," has come under fire from activists, who believe it privileges politicians' speech above their own. The policy allows posts that otherwise violate community standards to remain on the platform if the company believes the public's interest in seeing it outweighs the risk of harm.

The final conclusion I've made is that we, the people, must decide what comes next. The events of the past decade have brought to the public fore a fairly widespread recognition that certain speech is beyond the pale, but in nearly every instance I have seen, regulatory and legislative proposals to restrict such speech take the wrong aim, punishing companies (and their workers) for errors, or for not moving fast enough, while failing to do anything to address the problems at the root.

Although I am certain, for example, that the US government should not dictate to companies who is a terrorist, and that widespread bans on women's partial nudity are discriminatory and harmful to the feminist cause, I still struggle to find the right answer to what we should do about suspected bots, or brigading, or how we should handle hateful speech that doesn't quite reach the level of incitement.

While in general the governance of speech on social media has been on a trajectory of increased transparency and accountability, the policing of so-called terrorist speech is becoming more and more opaque, and decisions about policies are being made by elites, behind closed doors, absent the meaningful inclusion of civil society … and the communities likely to be most affected by such decisions.

the global default" of permissible speech, defined by a narrow set of actors and replicated by less powerful ones, that has become the status quo online.

What we say is important for in most cases the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

Freedom of speech does not protect you from the consequences of saying stupid shit. [ Blog post, March 12, 2012 ]

Choose your words carefully. They reveal your inner character.

I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

My wife has a slight impediment in her speech–every now and then she stops to breathe.

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

In this sense, the crisis of the Union was a crisis of communication. Northerners were waging war against the South with dangerous words; Southerners were trying to stifle those words with force, and the cross-fire was cutting off conversation, particularly in Congress, an institution grounded on open debate and free speech.

Ironically, a Slave Power–less Congress confirmed a long-held truism about the code of honor: it did indeed force men to watch their words.