Human Speech Quotes & Sayings

Among all the accomplishments of youth there is none preferable to a decent and agreeable behavior among men, a modest freedom of speech, a soft and elegant manner of address, a graceful and lovely deportment, a cheerful gravity and good-humor, with a mind appearing ever serene under the ruffling accidents of human life. — Isaac Watts

We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer's work, the title he gives to it, and the his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. [p.32] — Northrop Frye

[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly ... For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked.
Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63. — Plato

For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking. — Stephen Hawking

Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains. — James Henry Breasted

The question is ... whether we shall, by whatever means, succeed in reconstituting the natural world as the true terrain of politics, rehabilitating the personal experience of human beings as the initial measure of things, placing morality above politics and responsibility above our desires, in making human community meaningful, in returning content to human speech, in reconstituting, as the focus of all social action, the autonomous, integral, and dignified human I, ... — Vaclav Havel

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together. — Margaret Atwood

The passion for naming things is an odd human trait. It is strange that men always feel so much more at ease when they have put appellations on the things around them and that a wild, new region almost seems familiar and subdued once enough names have been used on it, even though in fact it is not changed in the slightest. Or, on second thought, it is perhaps not really strange. The urge to name must be as old as the human race, as old as speech which is one of the really fundamental characteristics by which we rise above the brutes, and thus a basic and essential part of the human spirit or soul. The naming fallacy is common enough even in science. Many a scientist claims to have explained some phenomenon when in truth all he has done is to give it a name. — George Gaylord Simpson

Remember, 'governance' is a big word that includes human rights, freedom of speech, economic transactions on a worldwide basis - it touches everything. It's everywhere, and that's why Internet governance is Topic A in many corners. — Vint Cerf

However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, as we like to say of things we do not fully understand, 'a life of its own. — Barbara Ehrenreich

This was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck. — George Orwell

John Howard Davies was not a very human person ... if you made a mistake of any kind, any sort of pause in speech, he would treat you rather as if he was a schoolmaster. — Graham Chapman

A fit queen for that nest of roses was the human flower that adorned it, for a year of love and luxury had ripened her youthful beauty into a perfect bloom. Graceful by nature, art had little to do for her, and, with a woman's aptitude, she had acquired the polish which society alone can give. Frank and artless as ever, yet less free in speech, less demonstrative in act; full of power and passion, yet still half unconscious of her gifts; beautiful with the beauty that wins the heart as well as satisfies the eye, yet unmarred by vanity or affectation. She now showed fair promise of becoming all that a deep and tender heart, an ardent soul and a gracious nature could make her, once life had tamed and taught her more. — Louisa May Alcott

So the technology that does the least alteration of nature, the least harm to other species and systems, and provides the greatest intimacy of human with nature, is the best. We could make a scale with that in mind, and judge any technology by its place on that scale: speech and eyeglasses, say, would rank low; nuclear bombs and coal plants, high. — Kirkpatrick Sale

Luz Castro "And then i explain that the world did know and remained silent. and that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. NEUTRALITY HELPS THE OPPRESSOR, NEVER THE VICTIM. SILENCE ENCOURAGES THE TORMENTOR, NEVER THE TORMENTED. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must- at that moment- become the center of the universe." Elie Wiesel (from his speech when given the Nobel Peace Prize.) — Elie Wiesel

All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

The biblical authors wrote of God's sovereignty over His world, and of man's experiences within that world, using such modes of speech about the natural order and human experience as were current in their days, and in a language that was common to themselves and their contemporaries. This is saying no more than that they wrote to be understood. Their picture of the world and things in it is not put forward as normative for later science, andy more than their use of Hebrew and Greek is put forward as a perfect model for composition in these languages. — J.I. Packer

Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech. — Mahatma Gandhi

Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvelous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively. — George MacDonald

Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission? — CrimethInc.

At the conclusion of all our studies we must try once again to experience the human soul as soul, and not just as a buzz of bioelectricity; the human will as will, and not just a surge of hormones; the human heart not as a fibrous, sticky pump, but as the metaphoric organ of understanding. We need not believe in them as metaphysical entities
they are as real as the flesh and blood they are made of. But we must believe in them as entities; not as analyzed fragments, but as wholes made real by our contemplation of them, by the words we use to talk of them, by the way we have transmuted them to speech. We must stand in awe of them as unassailable, even though they are dissected before our eyes. — Melvin Konner

Truth is the language that expresses universality. Newton did not "discover" a law that lay hidden from man like the answer to a rebus. He accomplished a creative operation. He founded a human speech which could express at one and the same time the fall of an apple and the rising of the sun. Truth is not that which is demonstrable but that which is ineluctable. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The message of the United States is not nuclear power. The message of the United States is a spiritual message. It is the message of human ideals; it is the message of human dignity; it is the message of the freedom of ideas, speech, press, the right to assemble, to worship, and the message of freedom of movement of people. — Hubert H. Humphrey

Some cognitive scientists believe human response to music provides evidence that we are more than just flesh and blood - that we also have souls. Their thinking is as follows: All reactions to external stimuli can be traced back to an evolutionary rationale. You pull your hand away from fire to avoid physical harm. You get butterflies before an important speech because the adrenaline running through your veins has caused a physiological fight-or-flight response. But there is no evolutionary context within which people's response to music makes sense - the tapping of a foot, the urge to sing along or get up and dance, there's just no survival benefit to these activities. For this reason, some believe that our response to music is proof that there's more to us than just biological and physiological mechanics - that the only way to be moved by the spirit, so to speak, is to have one in the first place. There — Jodi Picoult

It just seems to be a human trait to want to protect the speech of people with whom we agree. For the First Amendment, that is not good enough. So it is really important that we protect First Amendment rights of people no matter what side of the line they are on. — Floyd Abrams

When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart. — Charlotte Bronte

Women that speak against Islam are being labelled as islamophobic, as though our right to free speech is disregarded, when it comes down to an oppressive regime, which does not even recognise women as human... — Anita B. Sulser PhD

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species ... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. — John Steinbeck

2003 case before the Supreme Court in which Nike claimed that it had the First Amendment right to lie in its corporate marketing, a variation on the First Amendment right of free speech. (Except in certain contract and law enforcement/court situations, it's perfectly legal for human persons to lie in the United States. — Thom Hartmann

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not? — Dennis Potter

It is translation, more than speech itself, which provides incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity to think and to communicate thought.
We should do more of it. — David Bellos

As I have heard, since my arrival at this place, a circumstantial account of my death and dying speech, I take this early opportunity of contradicting the first, and of assuring you, that I have not as yet composed the latter. But by the All-Powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me! — George Washington

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. — J.M. Coetzee

Again, it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs. And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as strength, health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly. — Aristotle.

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Literature is not a game for the cloistered elect. Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. — John Steinbeck

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 — John Steinbeck

They judged me like they would judge themselves and that's what they could never understand, we are all human but we are not the same. — Nikki Rowe

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.17 — David Abram

It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support of national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation. — Adolf Hitler

The best society, the best human existence, arrives when humans most closely determine the truth, and act on the truth, and separate it from superstition, falsity, or misinformation. And there is no better system for determining the truth than free speech: Testing the validity of an idea in the waters of public discussion and debate ... — Dave Rodgers

In the world "out there," there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That's what it means to be human. — Duranti A Alessandro

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.'
That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked.
One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered. — Arthur Conan Doyle

All the big powers they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right. — Jack Kevorkian

Soldier on guard says they've identified "someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost". The other soldier, in the lookout, says "A girl about ten," but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[ ... ]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [ ... ]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to "if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?" [ ... ] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us. — Selma Dabbagh

If unbridled licence of speech and writing be granted to all, nothing will remain sacred and inviolate; even the highest and truest mandates of nature, justly held to be the common and noblest heritage of the human race, will not be spared. Thus, truth being gradually obscured by darkness, pernicious and manifold error, as too often happens, will easily prevail. — Pope Leo XIII

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love. — Jose Saramago

When you ask yourself, What does an intelligent system do?, it is intuitively obvious to think in terms of behavior. We demonstrate human intelligence through our speech, writing, and actions, right? Yes, but only to a point. Intelligence is something that is happening in your head. Behavior is an optional ingredient. This is not intuitively obvious, but it's not hard to understand either. — Jeff Hawkins

Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)] — Thomas I. Emerson

It can be hidden only in complete silence and perfect passivity, but its disclosure can almost never be achieved as a willful purpose, as though one possessed and could dispose of this "who" in the same manner he has and can dispose of his qualities. On the contrary, it is more than likely that the "who," which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters. This revelatory quality of speech and action comes to the fore where people are with others and neither for (the doer of good works) nor against them (the criminal) that is, in sheer human togetherness. Although nobody knows whom he reveals when he discloses himself in deed or word, he must be willing to risk the disclosure. — Hannah Arendt

The area between the nose and the chin, the subject of kissing and the vehicle for speech, is perhaps even more known and set upon than the eyes. The mouth is also riddled with a complex interweaving of folds, curves, flats and lost-and-found edges. These nuances are needed by a perceptive person who might try to understand human nature. — Robert Genn

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. — John Steinbeck

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush--and that was all. — Robert Frost

That I have the right to express myself freely at all times in all circumstances entails the idea that free speech is a 'basic human right' possessed by each individual, and, as such, trumps the interests of the society or group, including my neighbour. — Tom Stoppard

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts. — Thomas Carlyle

This is indeed India!
... . The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, whose yesterday's bear date with the modering antiquities for the rest of nations-the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the world combined. — Mark Twain

The phone is one hundred, one hundred and ten years old. There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech. — Brian Acton

Human eloquence or persuasiveness of speech are the mere trappings of the dead, if the living Spirit be absent; the prophet may preach to the bones in the valley, but it must be the breath from Heaven which will cause the slain to live. — D.L. Moody

Gramophone and movies were merely the mechanization of speech and gesture. But the radio and TV were not just the electronification of speech and gesture but the electronification of the entire range of human personal expressiveness. With electronification the flow is taken out of the wire and into the vacuum tube circuit, which confers freedom and flexibility such as are in metaphor and in words themselves. — Marshall McLuhan

Well, human rights defenders, freedom of speech advocates, lawyers that we spoke to said this is really an expansion. After the military ouster of Egypt's unpopular, but elected Islamist president in 2013, we saw political opponents being arrested by the thousands, really. Then we saw a popular comedian go off the air out of fear of retribution. — Leila Fadel

Freedom of speech is, to all Americans, as oxygen is to the human condition. It is a right that has been irreversibly programmed into our hard drive. We are free to speak our minds. An artist's right to express him or herself as best suits their art, is the artist's prerogative and it is guaranteed. — John C. McGinley

To communicate is truly a gift. It is a wondrous ability of your amazing human body, the ability that allows us to connect with other humans to give meaning to our lives. I will argue that it is what makes us human. — Kathleen Depperschmidt

The Bible is the inevitable outcome of God's continuous speech. It is the infallible declaration of His mind for us, put into our familiar human words. — A.W. Tozer

So everybody lives the way they're told to.
The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion. — Helen Potrebenko

Jobs, who could identify with each of those sentiments, wrote some of the lines himself, including "They push the human race forward." By the time of the Boston Macworld in early August, they had produced a rough version. They agreed it was not ready, but Jobs used the concepts, and the "think different" phrase, in his keynote speech there. "There's a germ of a brilliant idea there," he said at the time. "Apple is about people who think outside the box, who want to use computers to help them change the world." They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big. — Walter Isaacson

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women. — Robert Kroese

You're well enough looked after now' says Farouq. 'We are your friends. Don't we care about you? All this bitterness, it's in your own mind. To be accepted as a human being, you must behave like one. The more human you act, the more human you'll be.' He spoils the effect of this decent speech by adding with a smirk, 'Four-foot cunt. — Indra Sinha

Suddenly Dallington burst into speech. 'Listen, Lenox - I want to apologize...'

Lenox waved a dismissive hand. 'You're young,' he said. 'There are many lessons before you, some harder than this one... All too often things are blurry, though, John. It's the way of the world. Humans are blurry creatures, — Charles Finch

President Obama gave voice to exactly this sentiment in the speech he delivered as the first American president to visit Hiroshima, on May 27, 2016: "Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines," said Obama. "The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well." Our — Thomas L. Friedman

If you listen repeatedly to religious speech, after enough repetitions you will actually begin to notice God and His works where there was just chaotic life going on before. What was formerly chance becomes a miracle. What was pain is now karma. What was human nature is now sin. And regardless of whether these religious memes are presented as Truth or as allegorical mythology, you're conditioned just the same. — Richard Brodie

Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: "Who are you?" This disclosure of who somebody is, is implicit in both his words and his deeds; yet obviously the affinity between speech and revelation is much closer than that between action and revelation,4 just as the affinity between action and beginning is closer than that between speech and beginning, although many, and even most acts, are performed in the manner of speech. Without — Hannah Arendt

On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering — Frank X. Barron

Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You. Man speaks in many tongues - tongues of language, of art, of action - but the spirit is one; it is response to the You that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of man and then become sound in his throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in man but man stands in language and speaks out of it - so it is with all words, all spirit. Spirit is not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit. — Martin Buber

If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech. — W. Somerset Maugham

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent ... somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre. — Ellen McLaughlin

Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth. — Liu Xiaobo

Their silent wounds have speech
More eloquent than men;
Their tones can deeper reach
Than human voice or pen. — William Robert Woodman

The light of Christ illuminates the laboratory, his speech is the fount of communication, he makes possible the study of humans in all their interactions, he is the source of all life, he provides the wherewithal for every achievement of human civilization, he is the telos of all that is beautiful. He is, among his many other titles, the Christ of the academic road. — Mark Noll

Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, "This ... this ... "; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos. — Paul Goodman

I have known both of you all your lives, have carried your Daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back; if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man, you gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father's face, for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps, and howling, and I remember, with pain, his tears, which my hand or your grandmother's so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today, which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. — James Baldwin

eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning; they seducea the unstable;b they are experts in greedc - an accursed brood!d 15They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaame son of Bezer,6 who loved the wages of wickedness. 16But he was rebuked for his wrongdoing by a donkey - an animal without speech - who spoke with a human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.f — Anonymous

Turkey, with its political intolerance, as I have described it, is prepared to march forward, to break with its taboo about the Armenians, and is making great strides with respect to human rights and freedom of speech so that it can join the European Union. This alone shows how powerful the European idea is. — Orhan Pamuk

Human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars. — Gustave Flaubert

Speak Peace is a book that comes at an appropriate time when anger and violence dominates human attitudes. Marshall Rosenberg gives us the means to create peace through our speech and communication. A brilliant book. — Arun Manilal Gandhi

What said those two souls communicating through the language of the eyes, more perfect than that of the lips, the language given to the soul in order that sound may not mar the ecstasy of feeling? In such moments, when the thoughts of two happy beings penetrate into each other's souls through the eyes, the spoken word is halting, rude, and weak - it is as the harsh, slow roar of the thunder compared with the rapidity of the dazzling lightning flash, expressing feelings already recognized, ideas already understood, and if words are made use of it is only because the heart's desire, dominating all the being and flooding it with happiness, wills that the whole human organism with all its physical and psychical powers give expression to the song of joy that rolls through the soul. To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer. — Jose Rizal

It is commonplace to say that silent films are more "dreamlike," but what does that mean? In Nosferatu, it means that the characters are confronted with alarming images and denied the freedom to talk them away. There is no repartee in nightmares. Human speech dissipates the shadows and makes a room seem normal. Those things that live only at night do not need to talk, for their victims are asleep, waiting. — Roger Ebert

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translation necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of willful alteration, are themselves evidences that human language, whether in speech or print, cannot be the vehicle of the Word of God. — Thomas Paine

The irony that always amazes me when I see people up in arms about our war against Islamo-fascism is how they don't understand that the social freedoms they take for granted will be the first casualties of Islamic influence and control. The only social liberal thinkers in the Muslim Arab Islamo-fascist world are dead ones. Women's freedoms and their protection under the law, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, and other human rights will be the first to suffer. Oh yes, sorry, I forgot. . . there will always be the ACLU to depend on to keep the radical Muslims from taking these rights away. How foolish of me. Almost lost my head there. — Brigitte Gabriel

India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only. — Mark Twain

As a matter of fact, no other language in the world has received such praise as the Lithuanian language. The garlands of high honour have been taken to Lithuanian people for inventing, elaborating, and introducing the most highly developed human speech with its beautiful and clear phonology. Moreover, according to comparative philology, the Lithuanian language is best qualified to represent the primitive Aryan civilization and culture. — Immanuel Kant

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language. — Alfred North Whitehead

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. — George Bernard Shaw

Human was simultaneously the bearer of God's wise rule into the world, and also the creature who would bring the loyalty and praise of that creation for its Creator into love, speech, and conscious obedience. — N. T. Wright

In very ancient times of human evolution upon earth, humanity's revelation in word and sound was not differentiated in song and speech, but they were one. — Rudolf Steiner

Later, dictating the tale into his comlog, the Consul remembered it as a seamless whole, minus the pauses, hoarse voice, false starts, and small redundancies which were the timeless failings of human speech — Dan Simmons

Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind.
[ ... ] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the hostileness and intolerableness of you people. With sad hearts I now concede that Boov and humans will never to exist as one.'
I remember being really excited at this point. Could I possibly be hearing right? Were the Boov about to leave? I was so stupid.
'And so now I generously grant you Human Preserves - gifts of land that will be for humans forever, never to be taken away again, now.'
[ ... ] So that's when we Americans were given Florida. One state for three hundred million people. There were going to be some serious lines for the bathrooms. — Adam Rex

The human facility for perceiving speech begins very young: small babies have been shown to prefer the sounds of speech to nonspeech sounds. It is a fascinating paradox that humans can hear only up to fifteen different non-speech sounds per second, and beyond this they hear unremitting noise. Yet when they decode speech, they hear twenty to thirty distinct sounds per second. Somehow human speakers can pack, and in turn unpack, almost twice as many sounds if those sounds consist of consonants and vowels that are the components of the language they speak. — Christine Kenneally

The human brain is a wonderful organ. It starts to work as soon as you are born and doesn't stop until you get up to deliver a speech. — George Jessel

No man can make a speech alone. It is the great human power that strikes up from a thousand minds that acts upon him, and makes the speech. — James A. Garfield