Speech Quotes

If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.

In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan delivered one of the most unique and stunning conclusions ever to a political acceptance speech. Just at the climax, when the convention hall was energized and ready to erupt, Reagan pivoted to the need for divine help and guidance on the journey toward a better America. He then asked every citizen to join him in a moment of silent prayer. Instead of ending on a red-meat applause line, Reagan ended with divinely centered silence! We clearly could use a little more silence in our public discourse.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.

The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved...

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning...

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

If you speak when angry, you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.

He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.

There cannot be a greater rudeness, than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse... To which, if there be added, as is usual, a correcting of any mistake, or a contradiction of what has been said, it is a mark of yet greater pride and self-conceitedness, when we thus intrude our selves for teachers, and take upon us either to set another right in his story, or shew the mistakes of his judgement.

I do not say this, that I think there should be no difference of opinions in conversation, nor opposition in men's discourses... 'Tis not the owning one's dissent from another, that I speak against, but the manner of doing it.

The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion. And if it be not so in this civiliz'd part of the world, we must impute it to a neglect in education, which has not yet reform'd this antient piece of barbarity amongst us.

I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech. And that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech.

The quality of our thoughts is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds.

I've tried to maintain a relatively balanced view of the excesses on both sides of the political spectrum, but one thing I have clearly experienced repeatedly is that the Left will shun and exclude to a degree that's almost unknown on the Right. I've never had anyone on the Right, that I've talked to, refuse to talk to a hypothetical guest, for example. And I've had people on the Left, they just do that all the time.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

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.

When we speak to each other, we memorize that speech and then that has an influence on our own speech production. In effect, we transmit and infect one another with pronunciations every time we interact with others. Over time, if we have regular and prolonged contact with someone, we can start to pick up their sounds. For people living in an isolated community – perhaps a village in a remote valley, or a settlement on the other side of an ocean – this would lead to accent drift as quirks or misperceptions of speech become exaggerated.

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Be silent always when you doubt your sense.

I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

Be a good listener. Your ears will never get you in trouble.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Whatever advice you give, be brief.

People who know little are usually great talkers, while people who know much say little.

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.

It is the providence of knowledge to speak and the privilege of wisdom to listen.

I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent.

Never trust your tongue when your heart is bitter.

Secret thoughts and open countenance will go safely over the whole world.

He jests at scars that never felt a wound.

The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.

Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest.

Remember a closed mouth gathers no foot.

We lightly jest, with heedless words that never should be spoken; and do not know how words can bruise nor wounded hearts be broken.

Kind words are short to speak but their echoes are endless.

Think about this old adage from the world of negotiations: "Whoever speaks next, loses."

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.