#speech

It's not irrelevant, those moments of connection, those places where fiction saves your life. It's the most important thing there is. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#life

Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear. ↗

— George Eliot

#speech #life

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before. ↗

— China Miéville

#embassytown #language #lies-that-speak-truth #metaphors #similes

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#democracies #free-speech #money #opinion #organizations

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more. Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think, Few come within the compass of my curse,— Wherein I did not some notorious ill, As kill a man, or else devise his death, Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it, Accuse some innocent and forswear myself, Set deadly enmity between two friends, Make poor men's cattle break their necks; Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night, And bid the owners quench them with their tears. Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves, And set them upright at their dear friends' doors, Even when their sorrows almost were forgot; And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, 'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.' Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things As willingly as one would kill a fly, And nothing grieves me heartily indeed But that I cannot do ten thousand more. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#evil #final-words #gallows #insult #monologue

Someone heroic and valiant, not merely skilled in speech; someone who is kind and pure in heart. Someone who does not play with white roses that belong to others. ↗

— Sarah Mally

#godly-men #heroic #purity #roses #speech

Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts. ↗

— Voltaire

#speech #thoughts #men

You see, when a tragedy like this strikes, it is part of our nature to demand explanations - to try to impose some order on the chaos, and make sense out of that which seems senseless. ↗

— Barack Obama

#nature

You can't talk about fucking in America, people say you're dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that's cool. ↗

— Richard Pryor

#free-speech #pornography #priorities #sex #violence

Prolific irony - For 8 years, the finger on the button that could end the world belonged to a president who couldn't pronounce the word "nuclear. ↗

— T. Rafael Cimino

#americans #atomic-bomb #george-bush #nuclear #nuclear-weapons