Oral Quotes

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language. (James Thurber)
I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate. View quote
David Antin
The bible belt is oral territory and therefore despised by the literati. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
There is no individualism in Eastern or oral cultures. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The Irish, as a race, have the oral tradition in their blood. A direct question to them is an anathema, but in other cases, a mere syllable of a hero's name will elicit whole chapters of stories. View quote
P. L. Travers
I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.' View quote
Woody Allen
Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral. View quote
James Fenton
To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial. It is to immure him in emptiness. View quote
George Steiner
I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as a writer and also as an oral communicator. (Buchi Emecheta)
The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West. View quote
Harold Innis
Writing with a simplified alphabet checked the power of custom of an oral tradition but implied a decline in the power of expression and the creation of grooves which determined the channels of thought of readers and later writers. View quote
Harold Innis
It is suggested that all written works, including this one, have dangerous implications to the vitality of an oral tradition and to the health of a civilization, particularly if they thwart the interest of a people in culture, and following Aristotle, the cathartic effects of culture. "It is written but I say unto you" is a powerful directive to Western civilization. View quote
Harold Innis
Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival. View quote
Harold Innis
Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them. View quote
Huston Smith
Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition. View quote
N. Scott Momaday
The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin. View quote
David Antin
The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember. View quote
David Antin
If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation. View quote
Johann Most
Recent demonstration projects have shown that with some Federal support, a little funding can go a long way toward ensuring that low-income children have access to good oral health care. (Michael K. Simpson)
While most Americans have access to the best oral health care in the world, low-income children suffer disproportionately from oral disease. View quote
Michael K. Simpson
The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories. View quote
Spencer Bachus
It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury. View quote
George Plimpton
The fact is we are all, no matter where we live, surrounded constantly by stories, whether they are literal, oral or visual...the benign story I'm really growing tired of is the "humorous" story of the blonde woman who is either injured or humiliated all in order to sell beer. Not funny. I am tired of these stories. I am angered by these stories. There are other stories far more wondrous - stories of women claiming and reclaiming power, stories of rage and resistance and indefatigable courage, and stories of women and some men - reaching across great divides and into the most treacherous places on Earth where turmoil reigns and violence against women is unchecked, taking the hands of those women, helping to lift them up and leading them toward safety and sanctuary and self-determination. View quote
Jennifer Beals