Speech Quotes

2141 quotes by 1492 authors

[My] interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable...My interest… — John Green
Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. — Richard Chenevix Trench
Short of a small range of physical acts-a fight, murder, lovemaking-dialogue is the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters in a novel are… — Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build… — Sol Stein
Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms… — Sol Stein
They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of… — John Steinbeck
In dialogue, make sure that your attributives do not awkwardly interrupt a spoken sentence. Place them where the breath would come naturally in speech-that is,… — Elwyn Brooks White
Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and pithy,… — Bergen Evans
I now understand what Nelle Morton meant when she said that one of the great tasks in our time is to "hear people to speech."… — Parker J. Palmer
Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament… — Roland Barthes
The most precious things in speech are the pauses. — Ralph Richardson
We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it… — Benjamin Lee Whorf
Every legislative limitation upon utterance, however valid, may in a particular case serve as an inroad upon the freedom of speech which the Constitution protects. — Stanley Forman Reed
Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech. — Alan Dershowitz
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right… — Anthony Kennedy
Free speech not only lives, it rocks! — Oprah Winfrey
Free speech is life itself. — Salman Rushdie
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need… — Stephen Chbosky
By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by… — Harry A. Blackmun
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously… — Jean de la Bruyere

Who Wrote These Speech Quotes

1,492 authors contributed a total of 2,141 Speech Quotes, led by these top contributors: