Quotes & Sayings About Speech Communication

In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression. Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that characterizes innumerable species?
We are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered. The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars, the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem. — John Hay

Let there be but two occasions for speech - when the subject is one which you thoroughly know and when it is one on which you are compelled to speak. On these occasions alone is speech better than silence; on all others, it is better to be silent than to speak. — Isocrates

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

We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago! — Taylor Mali

Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you. — Walker Percy

Like the sorcerer of old, the television set casts its magic spell, freezing speech and action, turning the living into silent statues so long as the enchantment lasts. The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces, although there is danger there, as in the behavior it prevents: the talks, the games, the family festivities ... through which much of the child's learning takes place and through which his character is formed. Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people. — Urie Bronfenbrenner

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms. — William Labov

Words alone can effect great good as well as evil. A few apt words have swept candidates into office, ended as well as started wars, paved the way for peace and carried with them both hope as well as despair. Words alone have ruined lives, but have also brought forth healing. It is well known the harm words can cause, but the good they can bring is equally impressive. — Steve Goodier

If words are to be uttered, they would be from behind the partition. Unaccountable is distance, time to transport from this present minute.

If words are to be sounded, impress through the partition in ever slight measure to the other side the other signature the other hearing the other speech the other grasp. — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats. — Timothy Garton Ash

It's far more important why is being said, than what. — Aleksandra Ninkovic

To have much learning, to be skillful in handicraft, well-trained in discipline, and to be of good speech
this is the greatest blessing. — Gautama Buddha

[A digital snapshot] is meant primarily as a means of communication, and the images being sent are almost as ephemeral as speech, so rarely are they printed and made physical. — Geoffrey Batchen

Tears are a form of communication - like speech - and require a listener. — Erica Jong

For children who depend on mentally escaping into their minds to survive, imagination can become both refuge and desert island. — Na'ama Yehuda

I wondered why humans were even given the gift of speech at all. We no longer needed it; we've forgotten to talk about anything. We only waste it. — Rasmenia Massoud

I speak onstage to try to establish some method of communication. The songs are supposed to be a way of communicating. But speech and drinks and sometimes chocolates are also a way of communicating. — Jarvis Cocker

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are. — Thomas Merton

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ... — Maurice Maeterlinck

It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary ... The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint. — Thomas I. Emerson

The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept. — Thomas Merton

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken. — Ferdinand De Saussure

Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.

This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development. — R.G. Collingwood

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness. — Terry Eagleton

As long as you have a Cell Phone you're never alone — Stanley Victor Paskavich

It's a useful rule in Anglo-American communications that the English should double, and the Americans halve, the number of words they would normally employ. — Phyllis Bentley

I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me. — Octavia E. Butler

However they coped, children are not wrong to have learned to do what they could. — Na'ama Yehuda

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language. — David Brooks

Speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing that you could see through the eyes of another being. — Amitav Ghosh

Your skull encloses your brains. But never forget that anytime you open your mouth to talk, you have opened your mind for the entire world to see what is hidden in there! — Israelmore Ayivor

After all, all devices have their dangers. The discovery of speech introduced communication - and lies. The discovery of fire introduced cooking - and arson. The discovery of the compass improved navigation - and destroyed civilizations in Mexico and Peru. The automobile is marvelously useful - and kills Americans by the tens of thousands each year. Medical advances have saved lives by the millions - and intensified the population explosion. — Isaac Asimov

Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING ... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point ... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion. — Vera Nazarian

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic. — James Gleick

It is not in vain that man speaks to man. This is the value of literature. — Henry David Thoreau

The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails. Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the [Communications Decency Act] would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result. — Stewart Dalzell

We had lost the art of communication - but not, alas, the gift of speech. — Gordon Brown

Ordinary people who know nothing of phonetics or elocution have difficulties in understanding slow speech composed of perfect sounds, while they have no difficulty in comprehending an imperfect gabble if only the accent and rhythm are natural. — Alexander Graham Bell

Speech failures, communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, mishearings, episodes of muteness, stuttering and stammering, word forgetfulness, even the inability to grasp a joke: all these things invoke loneliness, forcing a reminder of the precarious, imperfect means by which we express our interiors to others. They undermine our footing in the social, casting us as outsiders, poor or non-participants. — Olivia Laing

We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought. — Oliver Sacks

Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them. — Laura Esquivel

Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. — Henry David Thoreau

Humans were denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon which dogs and men can get together is in fiction. — O. Henry

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. — Mark Twain

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void. — Barnett Newman

He used a minimum of words and no inflection whatsoever. It was a policeman's manner of speaking, direct and unadorned. — Davis Bunn

What the devil is 'wordsharing'? Does the word for 'speak' mean 'listen' just as well? If I said, 'Listen to me!' you might talk, instead."

"What use is the one without the other? It took me a long time to see this distinction in Valan speech."

Spinel thought over the list of 'share forms': learnsharing, worksharing, lovesharing. "Do you say 'hitsharing,' too? If I hit a rock with a chisel, does the rock hit me?"

"I would think so. Don't you feel it in your arm?"

He frowned and sought a better example; it was so obvious, it was impossible to explain. "I've got it: if Beryl bears a child, does the child bear Beryl? That's ridiculous."

"A mother is born when her child comes."

"Or if I swim in the sea, does the sea swim in me?"

"Does it not?"

Helplessly he thought, She can't be that crazy. "Please, you do know the difference, don't you?"

"Of course. What does it matter? — Joan Slonczewski

Wisdom does not only reflect itself in a person's knowledge of what to say. It appears also in his knowledge about how to say it and when it should be said! — Israelmore Ayivor

Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say. — C.S. Lewis

Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication - but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling — Isaac Asimov

Mend your speech a little, Lest you may mar your fortunes. — William Shakespeare

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. — T. S. Eliot

If the content of your speech is not authentic, talking or texting on a device doesn't mean you're communicating with another person. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Sometimes there are not the right words for my thoughts. Speech feels like it's not a natural way to communicate. This is when typing the words makes my thoughts come out easier. — Tina J. Richardson

What we have," Robert tells us, "is not democracy. It is imitative democracy. We have all the external signs. We have elections. We have a parliament. We have legislation. All the accessories of democracy. But anyone with common sense here knows we live in an authoritarian state. Putin has learned that if he offers the accessories of democracy, his regime can be very hard to accuse. The regime does one thing very well: It doesn't listen. So there can be free speech, channels of communication. But normally in a democracy, those voices affect decision making. In this country that doesn't happen. — David Greene

We no longer have a sufficiently high estimate of ourselves when we communicate. Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words. We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not a man. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I found myself speaking more slowly (in an attempt to obey the Bible in speech), as if I was speaking French instead of English. — A. J. Jacobs

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

We can no longer communicate with the apes by direct language, nor can we understand, without special study, their modes of communication which we have long since replaced by more elaborate forms. But it is at least presumable that they could still detect in our speech, at least when it is public and elaborate, the underlying tone values with which it began. Thus if we could take a gibbon ape to a college public lecture, he would not understand it, but he would "get a good deal of it." This is all the students get anyway. — Stephen Leacock

Speech is one symptom of affection; and silence one; the perfect communication is heard of none. — Emily Dickinson

Followers of Christ are not called to be merely tolerant of others. We are called to love those who disagree with us. Abnormal communication - blessing those who curse us - establishes the relational level of our communication and demonstrates our concern for others. — Tim Muehlhoff

The distinction between "magick" and "communication" exits only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions. — Robert Anton Wilson

Unless I speak, you won't see me. — Marty Rubin

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

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

If some people say what is in their hearts and other people say what glides easily off the tongue, how can we talk to one another? — Madeleine Thien

Vocal rest is awesome. It is like any kind of fast. Firstly, it is a purification of speech. It made me realize how not careful I am with the things I say. It also makes you find new ways of communication and new methods to connect with people. — Matisyahu

Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication - from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. — Neil Postman

Silence is a form of communication. Speech divides us. — David Malouf

She had uttered these words simply in order to provoke a reply in certain other words, which she seemed, indeed, to wish to hear spoken, but, from prudence, would let her friend be the first to speak. — Marcel Proust

All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite. — Elbert Hubbard

I do not understand this man," [Tempi] said. "Is he attempting to buy sex with me? Or does he wish to fight? — Patrick Rothfuss

(If this goes on, all communication everywhere will be through text messages or computers, and direct speech between two people, without a machine, will be outlawed.) — Ray Bradbury

Self-consciousness kills communication. — Rick Steves

Before you write - remember that every speech has something of 'you' in the writing. Don't take that away when you write. Be yourself. Be comfortable in your own skin. — Phil Collins

Clarity of thought is a must for brevity in speech. — Somali K Chakrabarti

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

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. — Ben Lerner

If there were some solitary or feral man, the passions of the soul would be sufficient for him; by them he would be conformed to things in order that he might have knowledge of them. But because man is naturally political and social, there is need for one man to make his conceptions known to others, which is done with speech. So significant speech was needed if men were to live together. Which is why those of different tongues do not easily live together. — Thomas Aquinas

Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans. — Daniel J. Levitin

Linguist say parties in the conversation will tolerate silence for four seconds before interjecting anything, however unrelated. — Bill Bryson

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

Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are trying to tell us/ ... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossible to do. — William Meredith