#speech

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

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

No man not inspired can make a good speech without preparation. ↗

— Daniel Webster

#inspired #make #man #preparation #speech

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence. ↗

— Norman O. Brown

#common #common sense #freedom #liberties #normal

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

#act #else #equating #everyone #freedom

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#certain #certain age #child #delivers #earnestness

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe... that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment. As all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. ↗

— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

#law #experience