833 Quotes About Speech

In fact, when you think about it, if a word from the street occurs in a book it is not the writer who is guilty, but the readers, and primarily those readers belonging to the upper classes: for they are the ones who will never utter a single decent Russian word; their speech is so abundantly stuffed with every manner of French, German, and English words that you want to block your ears...

Greetings, Queen of the RainWings!” Starflight said grandly. He swept his wings out and bowed low. “Ooooo,” the queen said again.“We have come to you despite great peril, in a time of crisis, to throw ourselves upon your merciful —”“We need your help,” Tsunami said.

Recently I received very upsetting emails from two friends in a particular organization who want Progressives to temper their speech because it makes some uncomfortable. This discomfort they say detracts from the ability to bring these people into the fold. The question is; if one must tell less than the truth to bring some into the fold, what good is having them in the first place?

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.

The organs concerned in the production of English speech sounds are the larynx, the velum, the lips, the tongue (that punchinello in the troupe), and, last but not least, the lower jaw; mainly upon its overenergetic and somewhat ruminant motion did Pnin rely when translating in class passages in the Russian grammar or some poem by Pushkin. If his Russian was music, his English was murder.

I had come this far without the elegance of speech. ... I could not speak coherently. I stuttered in my mind. I could not express my perception of the sacred. I could speak everyday language: Please pass the salt. I would like . . . When are we going . . . I'll meet you there. I wanted the intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors to pass through my language, my life.

Somehow, there is a tendency among people that God is deaf to all that proceeds out of mouth. This in turn, leads to unrestrained verbal diarrhoea. How foolish are we! He who planted the ear, does He not hear?

What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the antiracist power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their racist ideas and fears, conserving their inequitable society?

A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities" -- A WORLD SPLIT APART: Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978