Speech Quotes - page 32
We are stripped of authority and reduced and devaluated and silenced. Silenced here means that the purposes of the First Amendment, premised upon conditions presumed and promoted by protecting free speech, do not pertain to women because they are not our conditions. Consider them: individual self-fulfillment – how does pornography promote our individual self-fulfillment? How does sexual inequality even permit it? Even if she can form words, who listens to a woman with a penis in her mouth?
Catharine MacKinnon
And so the teaching (Torah) was likened to water: like water comes down from a high place to a low place, so the teaching descended from its honorable place, as it is His will and wisdom, and the light of Him that be blessed and thought cannot grasp it at all. From there it went in the secret stairway via the worlds, until it was dressed in material things and matters of this world, which are all the ordinants (mitzvot) and their ways, in combinations of material letters in ink on the book, twenty four books in the Tanakh, so thought will be able to comprehend it, and even speech and act, below the level of thought.
Shneur Zalman of Liadi
Perhaps he could organize everyone. He could stand up on something and shout slogans until he had attracted enough attention. Then he could begin some rambling speech, hoping that the people around him would be so desperate for leadership they wouldn't notice the absurdity of what he said.
George Alec Effinger
His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An obsolete model with a non-working switch - it can't be turned off unless you cut off the electric power altogether. So I'd have to smash him in the kisser. No, I'd have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious he'd keep talking. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he'd keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.
Klaus Kinski
From the beginning of the year to the end, day and night, morning and evening, in action and repose, in speech and in silence, the warrior must keep death constantly before him and have ever in mind that the one death [which he has to give] should not be suffered in vain. In other words [he must have perfect control over his own death] just as if he were holding an intemperate steed in rein. Only he who truly keeps death in mind this way can understand what is meant by [Yamaga Soko's maxim of] "preparedness."
Yoshida Shoin
Speech is an acoustic reality, writing a visual one. Performance of the former has been perfected through a million years of natural selection in the evolutionary process. The latter is a trick which we began to learn only yesterday (in terms of evolutionary time). To "hear" language (and to "say" it) is programmed in our genes; to "see" it (and "read" it) is not.
Eric A. Havelock
[... language, as an example of a semiotic system, contains all four levels of organization as follows:]
First, it is transmitted physically, by sound waves traveling through the air; secondly, it is produced and received biologically, by the human brain and its associated organs of speech and hearing; thirdly it is exchanged socially, in contexts set up and defined by the social structure; and fourthly it is organized semiotically as a system of meanings.
Michael Halliday
Traditionally, grammar has always been a grammar of written language: and it has always been a product grammar" ['Product' is here used as one term of the Hjelmslevian pair process/product. ] A process/product distinction is a relevant one for linguists because it corresponds to that between our experience of speech and our experience of writing: writing exists whereas speech happens.
Michael Halliday
What should our policy be towards non-Marxist ideas? As far as unmistakable counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs of the socialist cause are concerned, the matter is easy, we simply deprive them of their freedom of speech. But incorrect ideas among the people are quite a different matter. Will it do to ban such ideas and deny them any opportunity for expression? Certainly not. It is not only futile but very harmful to use crude methods in dealing with ideological questions among the people, with questions about man's mental world. You may ban the expression of wrong ideas, but the ideas will still be there. On the other hand, if correct ideas are pampered in hothouses and never exposed to the elements and immunized against disease, they will not win out against erroneous ones. Therefore, it is only by employing the method of discussion, criticism and reasoning that we can really foster correct ideas and overcome wrong ones, and that we can really settle issues.
Mao Zedong
