Speech Quotes - page 8

Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land." (Bruce Chatwin)
Without Freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom;and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. Republics and limited monarchies derive their strength and vigor from a popular examination into the action of the magistrates. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
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. View quote
Herbert Hoover
You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.... Every step in that direction poisons the very roots of liberalism. It poisons political equality, free speech, free press, and equality of opportunity. It is the road not to more liberty but to less liberty. View quote
Herbert Hoover
Tabloids invoke freedom of speech, but they're not interested in that, they're just interested in who's shagging whom, who's got drunk. And if you take that pretend, faux moral standpoint, you end up with people in public life being completely boring. Like they've had their genitals removed. View quote
Jarvis Cocker
Americans' right to free speech should not be proportionate to their bank accounts. View quote
Bernie Sanders
The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. View quote
Julian Assange
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. View quote
Richard Jeni
Look wise, say nothing, and grunt. Speech was given to conceal thought. View quote
William Osler
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates. (Thomas Mann)
And for Incoherent Speech, it was amongst the Gentiles taken for one sort of Prophecy, because the Prophets of their Oracles, intoxicated with a spirit, or vapor from the cave of the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, were for a time really mad, and spake like mad-men; of whoose loose words a sense might be made to fit any event, in such sort, as all bodies are said to be made of Materia prima. View quote
Thomas Hobbes
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. View quote
Charles Bradlaugh
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. View quote
John Steinbeck
When Kino had finished, Juana came back to the fire and ate her breakfast. They had spoken once, but there is not need for speech if it is only a habit anyway. Kino sighed with satisfaction - and that was conversation. View quote
John Steinbeck
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. View quote
John Steinbeck
I grew up with the concept of freedom of speech. So I'm too old, it's too late for me to adjust to the new world, the new world order. View quote
Bobby Fischer
When Eudæmonidas heard a philosopher arguing that only a wise man can be a good general, "This is a wonderful speech," said he; "but he that saith it never heard the sound of trumpets." View quote
Plutarch
A speech belongs half to the speaker and half to the listener. View quote
Michel de Montaigne
Happy is the man whom the Muses love: sweet speech flows from his mouth. View quote
Hesiod
So the people will pay the penalty for their kings' presumption, who, by devising evil, turn justice from her path with tortuous speech. (Hesiod)
Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. View quote
Salman Rushdie
When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment. View quote
Terry Pratchett
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. View quote
Robert G. Ingersoll
I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion - to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right - because it is his right - but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge - in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech. View quote
Robert G. Ingersoll