Famous Discourse Quotes & Sayings

I have been lately introduced to the famous Thomas Paine, and like him very well. He is vain beyond all belief, but he has reason to be vain, and for my part I forgive him. He has done wonders for the cause of liberty, both in America and Europe, and I believe him to be conscientiously an honest man. He converses extremely well; and I find him wittier in discourse than in his writings, where his humour is clumsy enough. — Wolfe Tone

television's sole function these days is to drive permanent wedges between people with different philosophies in such a way that an insatiable furor keeps us coming back to confirm our biases and condemn our opponents. Reasonable discourse doesn't sell commercial time. Intellectual inflammation rules the airwaves. That and reality shows about repugnant housewives yearning to be famous. — Doug Philips

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. — Terry Eagleton

Soon after [George Yeo] became a politician, he made a famous speech, and for the first time, the term "OB markers" was used in political discourse. He was using golfing language to vividly make the point that Singapore needed OB markers to demarcate areas of public life that should remain out of bounds to social activism and the media. Otherwise, society paid an unacceptably high price. His essential point was that Singaporeans worked better if the cover of the banyan tree did not remain so broad. He was signalling that the state should pull back and give the people more free play. — Cheong Yip Seng