Quotes & Sayings About Speech In Public
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Top Speech In Public Quotes
If everyone could learn how to read books properly and how to use them as effective tools for daily living, the facilities of colleges could easily go out of existence without any loss to society.' -From a speech by the president of Mount Holyoke College, as reported in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 13, 1938 — Francis Beauchesne Thornton
You dreamed like all mothers do.
Until he began to speak aloud,
Your boy,
calling for justice in the market place,
Demanding integrity and fair play
in the courts and halls of business.
Declaring the Realm of God
Imminent,
Manifest . . .
Jesus leapt into the swelling crowds
like an axe into wood,
Uncompromising and unrelenting
in his passionate call
for peace and justice.
Jesus, your boy,
causing havoc in public,
critiquing and condemning
the status quo,
breaking rule after rule . . .
And with every speech,
with every act of defiance,
with every call to liberation,
with every amazing deed,
Your dreams of peace and liberation,
Your dreams of a secure old age,
Your dreams of grandchildren--
Evaporated. — Edwina Gateley
Fill your mouth with marbles and make a speech. Every day reduce the number of marbles in your mouth and make a speech. You will soon become an accredited public speaker
as soon as you have lost all your marbles. — Brooks Hays
I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned. — Lucy Stone
Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision - and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice. — Sara Paretsky
A recent survey stated that the average person's greatest fear is having to give a speech in public. Somehow this ranked even higher than death which was third on the list. So, you're telling me that at a funeral, most people would rather be the guy in the coffin than have to stand up and give a eulogy. — Jerry Seinfeld
The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly as necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else. — Theodore Roosevelt
My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct. — Bob Sheppard
I think we've produced a stronger prohibition on real racism, while maintaining freedom of speech in ordinary public discussion. So I'm very comfortable with where we're at. We're not dogmatic or impervious to a further argument, that's why we released it as an exposure draft rather than simply releasing it straight into the parliament. — Tony Abbott
was Goldman's ideas that were dangerous: her ideal of a just and beautiful society inspired struggles for social change, and her uncompromising presence in public life exposed the hypocrisies of allegedly democratic governance. She had a unique ability to generate coalitions among liberal and radical groups, and among immigrants and native-born citizens, by articulating their common struggles for freedom of speech (including freedom to organize the workplace), right to a fair trial, availability of birth control, right to travel, and an overall spirit of individual freedom. Looking back at Goldman's time from within this gaze, the authorities look extreme, if not paranoid and even ridiculous, for their fervent efforts to silence her rather than simply accept her words as a protected form of speech in American society. — Kathy E. Ferguson
I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction. — Abraham Lincoln
There comes a day of public ceremonial, and a chance to make a speech ... A million voters with IQs below 60 have their ears glued to the radio. It takes four days' hard work to concoct a speech without a sensible word in it. Next a dam must be opened somewhere. Four dry Senators get drunk and make a painful scene. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains. — H.L. Mencken
The specific use of folks as an exclusionary and inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in the history of the United States before 1980, and you will find not one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: 'We here highly resolve that these folks shall not have died in vain; and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. — Susan Jacoby
We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence. — Daniel M. Gilbert
Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't "speak," she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally sup- ports the "logic" of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materializes what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when "theoretical" or political, is never simple or linear or "objectified," generalized: she draws her story into history. — Helene Cixous
It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington. — David Maraniss
He very soon acquired the reputation of being the best public speaker of his time. He had taken pains to master the art, approaching it with scientific precision. On the morning of a day on which he was giving a speech, he once told Wilkie Collins, he would take a long walk during which he would establish the various headings to be dealt with. Then, in his mind's eye, he would arrange them as on a cart wheel, with himself as the hub and each heading a spoke. As he dealt with a subject, the relevant imaginary spoke would drop out. When there were no more spokes, the speech was at an end. Close observers of Dickens noticed that while he was speaking he would make a quick action of the finger at the end of each topic, as if he were knocking the spoke away. — Simon Callow
Unfortunately, the media, which are not at all reluctant to act in their own self-interest, have succeeded in equating reform in the public mind with further restrictions on just about everyone else's freedom of political speech. — James L. Buckley
The wellspring for the passion that drove public speech and action in behalf of the environment was in large part religious and ethical. Environmentalism, in short, had become one version of nature religion in the lingering shadow of American transcendentalism. — Catherine L. Albanese
A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves. — J.B. Priestley
There's one more serious risk for America that I want to mention here - the risk we have created by shouting down and shutting up any discussion of faith in the public square. It's as if we've decided expressions or discussions of faith shouldn't qualify as free speech. What's even stranger is the way it has somehow been tied to the concept of separation of church and state, even though that concept has nothing to do with people living by or publicly discussing their faith. — Ben Carson
The two men were greedily hunched over the table, like two wolves disputing a carcass, but their muttered speech in the echoing hall resembled more the grunting of pigs. One was less than a wolf: he was a public prosecutor. The other was more than a pig, he was a chief commissioner of police. — Jan Neruda
Being lately engaged to plead a cause before the Court of the Hundred, the crowd was so great that I could not get to my place without crossing the tribunal where the judges sat. And I have this pleasing circumstance to add further, that a young nobleman, having had his tunic torn, an ordinary occurrence in a crowd, stood with his gown thrown over him, to hear me, and that during the seven hours I was speaking, whilst my success more than counterbalanced the fatigue of so long a speech. So let us set to and not screen our own indolence under pretence of that of the public. Never, be very sure of that, will there be wanting hearers and readers, so long as we can only supply them with speakers and writers worth their attention. — Pliny The Younger
He had never clearly fathomed the true weight of a word of good, truth, and purity cast in the stream of human speech and the deep bend it cut in it. Nor had he thought that a word spoken boldly and loudly, with no hint of false shame, but rather with courage, that this word would not drown in the ugly cries of fashionable satyrs but would plunge like a pearl into the abyss of public life and always find itself a shell.
Many stumble over a good word, blushing in embarrassment, and utter a careless word boldly and loudly, never suspecting that it, too, unfortunately, will not go for naught but will leave a long trail of often times ineradicable evil.
p. 296 — Ivan Goncharov
Listing rights generally involves enumerating things you may do without interference (the right to free speech) or may not be done to you without your permission (illegal search and seizure, loud boy-band music in public places). They are protections, not gifts of material goods. Material goods and services must be taken from others, or provided by their labor, so if you believe you have an absolute right to them, and others don't choose to provide it to you, you then have a 'right' to steal from them. But what about their far more fundamental right not to be robbed? — Cliff Asness
In an era of weaponized sensitivity, participation in public discourse is growing so perilous, so fraught with the danger of being caught out for using the wrong word or failing to uphold the latest orthodoxy in relation to disability, sexual orientation, economic class, race or ethnicity, that many are apt to bow out. Perhaps intimidating their elders into silence is the intention of the identity-politics cabal - and maybe my generation should retreat to our living rooms and let the young people tear one another apart over who seemed to imply that Asians are good at math. — Lionel Shriver
Right. And our first job is to teach her to give a speech on the Grand Balcony in three days."
"That does not sound too difficult. Has she done much public speaking?"
Amilia forced a smile. "A week ago she said the word no. — Michael J. Sullivan
You did all this," I breathe heavy with awe. "You gave them the courage to take a stand."
He shakes his head. "No. You did. You started all this," he leans in, his lips hot and warm breath tickling against my ear. "You gave me the strength," he sucks in a quick breathe and lets out a laughing exhale. "You gave me the strength to break free of all these ridiculous canons of public behavior."
I smile, partly because I find his sophisticated speech funny, but mostly because he makes my heart bounce.
I don't believe it was me who inspired all these people. It's obvious it was David. But I did manage to inspire. I inspired David and that's all it takes. It takes for just one person to make a stand, and another to be moved and inspired by that one brave act. Gravity takes care of the rest as the word spreads and everything falls into place. — David R. Torres
Public speaking is scary, I think. I've gotten way better at it. If I have to do a speech and be like, 'I'm a YouTuber,' then that's easy, but if I have to get up there and pretend I know something in front of adults, it's never fine. In front of adults, it's like, 'Ahhhh they're going to judge me.' — Connor Franta
Probably no other country in the 1920s - certainly not the United States, with its stark repression of the Left, vicious antiunion policies, and legally enshrined racism - had so wide a range of free speech, such a vital public sphere, as Germany. — Eric D. Weitz
Pull yourself together, Detective. You're embarrassing yourself, and more imprtant, you're embarrassing me."
"They're going to do it outside. In public."
"So the fuck what?"
"Public," Peabody said, head still between her knees.
"You're being honored by this department and this city for having the integrity, the courage, and the skill to take out a blight on this department and this city. Dirty, murdering, greedy, treacherous cops are sitting in cages right now because you had that integrity, courage, and skill. I don't care if they do this damn thing in Grand Central, you will get on your feet. You will not puke, pass out, cry like a baby, or squeal like a girl. That's a goddamn order."
"I had more of a 'Relax, Peabody, this is a proud moment' sort of speech in mind," McNab murmured to Roarke.
Roarke shook his head, grinned. "Did you now? You've a bit to learn yet, haven't you? — J.D. Robb
The essence and foundation of House of Commons debating is formal conversation. The set speech, the harangue addressed to constituents, or to the wider public out of doors, has never succeeded much in our small wisely-built chamber. To do any good you have got to get down to grips with the subject and in human touch with the audience. — Winston Churchill
No matter how bad things got, no matter how anxious the staff became, the commander had to "preserve optimism in himself and in his command. Without confidence, enthusiasm and optimism in the command, victory is scarcely obtainable." Eisenhower realized that "optimism and pessimism are infectious and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other direction." He learned that a commander's optimism "has a most extraordinary effect upon all with whom he comes in contact. With this clear realization, I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory - that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. — Stephen E. Ambrose
It's ridiculous to accept on a blog or in a forum speech what would be seen as hooliganism or delinquency if practiced in a public space."37 — Danielle Keats Citron
The insistence in Darcy's voice is a symptom of his passion for Elizabeth; it emerges even in their most mundane interactions. We can trace the development of Darcy's feelings for Elizabeth in the tone of his voice. This reaches its climax in the scene in which he proposes to her. His negative persistence, beginning his speech with 'In vain have I struggled. It will not do,' becomes almost violent, in part because the novel itself is so restrained and Darcy is the most restrained of all the characters.
Now, please listen carefully to that 'you.' Darcy seldom if ever addresses Elizabeth by her name, but he has a special way of saying 'you' when he addresses her a few times that makes the impersonal pronoun a term of ultimate intimacy. One should appreciate such nuances in a culture such as ours, where everyone is encouraged to demonstrate in the most exaggerated manner his love for the Imam and yet forbidden from any public articulation of private feelings, especially love. — Azar Nafisi
Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any
commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they
tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which
they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready
talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage,
sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body
politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire
the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do
wrong to the republic. — Theodore Roosevelt
I support people having a gun in public full stop, not just in your home. We don't have the right to bear arms because of burglars. We have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It's not about duck hunting, it's about the ability of the individual. It's the same reason we have freedom of speech, — Vince Vaughn
Song is the licensed medium for bawling in public things too silly or sacred to be uttered in ordinary speech. — Oliver Herford
In sharp contrast, the blessings are speeches of new energy, for they promise future well-being to those who are without hope. In the deathly world of riches, fullness, and uncritical laughter, those who now live in poverty, hunger, and grief are hopeless. They are indeed nonpersons consigned to nonhistory. They have no public existence, and so the public well-being can never extend to them. But the blessings open a new possibility. So the speech of Jesus, like the speech of the entire prophetic tradition, moves from woe to blessing, from judgment to hope, from criticism to energy. The alternative community to be shaped from the poor, hungry, and grieving is called to disengage from the woe pattern of life to end its fascination with that other ordering, and to embrace the blessing pattern. — Walter Brueggemann
I was always a clown. In the eighth grade I won a city speech contest by doing an Eddie Murphy routine. I'm no good at public speaking, but if I can assume a role and speak as that person, then I'm fine. When I had to give a book report, I always did it in character. — Jason Wiles
Take public speaking: I spent all of my twenties and early thirties avoiding it. When I once asked a speech teacher about my aversion, she explained that dancers and writers were especially difficult to teach to speak in public, since both had chosen a profession in which they didn't have to talk - and I had been both. — Gloria Steinem
Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech. — Abraham Lincoln
In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club. — Mario Cuomo
It has been my pleasure to speak at many Federalist Society gatherings around the country, and I think one thing your organization has definitely done is to contribute to free speech, free debate, and most importantly public understanding of, awareness of, and appreciation of the Constitution. So that's a marvelous contribution, and in a way I must say I'm jealous at how the Federalist Society has thrived at law schools. — Nadine Strossen
This was the stuff nightmares were made of. Going to school in your Spiderman pj's. Giving a public speech naked. And discovering you'd accidentally slept with your boss. — Jill Shalvis
To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
the breathing in unison.
Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech,
And babble the same speech without need of meaning ...
No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only
But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public. — T. S. Eliot
This deeply free and public space plays a vital role in our world, equally important in our digital age as in Greco-Roman times, when they were marketplaces for goods and ideas. As common ground, squares are equitable and democratic; they have played a fundamental role in the development of free speech. — Catie Marron
My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them. — Fran Lebowitz
True eloquence is irresistible. It charms by its images of beauty, it enforces an argument by its vehement simplicity. Orators whose speeches are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," only prevail where truth is not understood, for knowledge and simplicity are the foundation of all true eloquence. Eloquence abounds in beautiful and natural images, sublime but simple conceptions, in passionate but plain words. Burning words appeal to the emotions as well as to the intellect; they stir the soul and touch the heart. — Albert Ellery Bergh
The Princess's so-called 'time and space speech' at the end of '93 about a year after the formal separation, looking back on it it's called her retirement from public life but we've seen in fact it's nothing of the kind. — Anthony Holden
The government being the peoples business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Publicity is therefore as essential to honest administration as freedom of speech is to representative government. Equal rights to all and special privileges to none is the maxim which should control in all departments of government. — William Jennings Bryan
In days when the public safety is imminently threatened, and the fate of a nation may hang upon a single act, we owe frank speech, above all other men, to him who is highest in authority. I shall speak to you as man to man. — Robert Dale Owen
Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "the public's right to know"; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. — Janet Malcolm
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
I will try and remember always to approach God in secret with as much reverence in speech, posture, and behavior as in public. Help me, Thou who knowest my frame and pitiest as a father his children. — David Livingstone
A recent survey of Top Five Fears places public speaking alongside "identity theft" and "mass shootings." In the 1980s, it completed with "nuclear destruction." In the 1970s, "shark attack. — John Capecci And Timothy Cage
What yells out at the US public ... is the incandescent hypocrisy of so many people who, in the name of free speech, persecute its practitioners if their opinions are conservative. — William F. Buckley Jr.
Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place. — Greil Marcus
Active liberty is particularly at risk when law restricts speech directly related to the shaping of public opinion, for example, speech that takes place in areas related to politics and policy-making by elected officials. That special risk justifies especially strong pro-speech judicial presumptions. It also justifies careful review whenever the speech in question seeks to shape public opinion, particularly if that opinion in turn will affect the political process and the kind of society in which we live. — Stephen Breyer
Speakers find joy in public speaking when they realize that a speech is all about the audience, not the speaker. Most speakers are so caught up in their own concerns and so driven to cover certain points or get a certain message across that they can't be bothered to think in more than a perfunctory way about the audience. And the irony is, of course, that there is no hope of getting your message across if that's all the energy you put into the audience. So let go, and give the moment to the audience. — Nick Morgan
One of the best things about the award season is that when a British film succeeds at the Oscars and BAFTAs, such as 'Slumdog Millionaire' in 2009 and 'The King's Speech' this year, the British public get right behind it with an immense sense of national pride. — Gurinder Chadha
Tabloids invoke freedom of speech, but they're not interested in that, they're just interested in who's shagging whom, who's got drunk. And if you take that pretend, faux moral standpoint, you end up with people in public life being completely boring. Like they've had their genitals removed. — Jarvis Cocker
It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers. — Richard Posner
Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality. — Douglas Adams
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces. — Rebecca MacKinnon
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945] — George Orwell
Therefore, while social phobics and patients with AvPD both avoid out of fear, the social phobic's fears mainly arise in the clinical context of feeling, or actually being called upon to perform in ways ranging from giving a speech to urinating in a public washroom. In contrast the avoidant's fears generally arise in the context of interpersonal relationships, the main marker I look for in making the diagnosis of AvPD. — Martin Kantor
[Persons] who are recognized as citizens in any one state of the Union [have] the right to enter every other state, whenever they pleased ... full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might meet; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. — Jack Kevorkian
Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act. — Slavoj Zizek
I had my first amendment rights removed by a USA judge for a video that I recorded in the public sidewalk. The right to free speech and freedom of the press only partially exists in the USA. — Steven Magee
The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality ...
The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us ...
But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention. — Mark Galli
Depend upon it, sir, it is when you come close to a man in conservation that you discover what his real abilities are; to make a speech in a public assembly is a knack. — Samuel Johnson
The greatest and truest models for all oratorsis Demosthenes. One who has not studied deeply and constantly all the great speeches of the great Athenian, is not prepared to speak in public. Only as the constant companion of Demosthenes, Burke, Fox, Canning and Webster, can we hope to become orators. — Woodrow Wilson
The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write their plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause. — E.B. White
When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them. — Kato Lomb
The moral panic about supposedly unpatriotic educators was driven by international war hysteria combined with agitation over the growing domestic political strength of teachers unions. In 1917 and 1918, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to ban public speech and actions "disloyal" to the United States military and government, especially among socialists, communists, pacifists, immigrants, and other groups perceived as affiliated with European leftism. More than any other force, the American Legion, a veterans' organization, pushed this ethos of unquestioning patriotism onto the nation's public schools. The Legion was influential: 16 U.S. senators and 130 congressmen identified as members. It promoted the idea that the Communist Party in Moscow actively recruited American teachers in order to enlist them in brainwashing the nation's youth. The Legion saw all left-of-center political activity as unacceptably anti-American. — Dana Goldstein
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
Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin? — Jacques Barzun
Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [ ... ] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977
never" [ ... ] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [ ... ] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism. — Rachel Maddow
People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons. 'Reason,' Dr. Pritchett had told them, 'is the most naive of all superstitions.'
'The source of public opinion?' said Claude Slagenhop in a public radio speech. 'There is no source of public opinion. It is spontaneously general. It is a reflex of the collective instinct of the collective mind. — Ayn Rand
The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. — George Orwell
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