#speech

With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets. ↗

— Orson Scott Card

#anonymous #free-speech #identity #internet #trolling

Lead us toward a speech, which is as beautiful as silence, and toward a silence, which is as beautiful as the sweetest and truest of words. (119) ↗

— Jean-Yves Leloup

#silence #speech #truth #beauty

There is great worth in holding universal truths and timelessly beautiful words in your heart, which will stay there forever, infusing your thoughts and speech… ↗

— Dan Stevens

#inspirational #quotes #speech #thoughts #truths

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#laugh #speech #talking #business

Anyone wishing to communicate with Americans should do so by e-mail, which has been specially invented for the purpose, involving neither physical proximity nor speech. ↗

— Auberon Waugh

#been #communicate #e-mail #invented #involving

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. ↗

— George Orwell

#literature #orwell #poet #poetry #prose

Sometimes I wonder what happened to great speeches, but then I turn on the TV and I’m in wonder at how good my candidate looks. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #politics #speeches #funny

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator. ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#brevity #orator #recommendation #senator #speech

For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#speech #life

[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#madame-bovary #music #speech #love