This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Speech is the voice of the heart." - Kaibara Ekken, or Ekiken, also known as Atsunobu NULL
"Speech is given to many; intelligence to few." - Latin Proverbs
"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"For every man’s nature is concealed with many folds of disguise, and covered as it were with various veils. His brows, his eyes, and very often his countenance, are deceitful, and his speech is most commonly a lie." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism - The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought. The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us does not? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in. The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as Communists or Fascists by their opponents. Freedom of speech is not what is used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others. The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed." - Margaret Chase Smith
"A people’s speech is the skin of its culture." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"A man's character is revealed by his speech." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"The speaker's character, not his speech, persuades." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"The true use of speech is not so much to express our wants as to conceal them." - Oliver Goldsmith
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater, and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, which is the measure of the universe; and science struck the thrones of earth and heaven, which shook, but fell not; and the harmonious mind poured itself forth in all-prophetic song; and music lifted up the listening spirit until it walked, except from mortal care, Godlike, o’er the clear billows of sweet sound." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"I will not steep my speech in lies; the test of any man lies in action." - Pindar NULL
"Speech contains both injuries and benefits in the largest measure." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"A function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding." - Potter Stewart
"Silence is more profitable than abundance of speech." - Ptah-hotep, aka Ptahhotpe or Ptah-Hotep NULL
"Our flag stands for "liberty and justice for all." Our flag must never be misused or defiled as a bandana for war crimes, as a gag against the people's freedom of speech and conscience or as a fig leaf to hide the shame of charlatans in high public office, who violate our Constitution, our laws and our founding fathers' framework for accountable, responsive government." - Ralph Nader
"Speech is better than silence; silence is better than speech." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The music that can deepest reach, cure all ill, is conceal speech." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A constant governance of our speech, according to duty and reason, is a high instance and a special argument of a thoroughly sincere and solid goodness." - Socrates NULL
"Speech is the mirror of action." - Solon NULL
"If speech is silvern, then silence is golden." - Midrash or The Midrash NULL
"Your silence is better than your speech." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL
"In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance." - Thomas Carlyle
"Music is a kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that." - Thomas Carlyle
"Speech is of time, silence is of eternity." - Thomas Carlyle
"Speech that leads not to action, still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the earth." - Thomas Carlyle
"Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection." - Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell
"Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both." - John Andrew Holmes
"The body is likened to a small city: like two kings who wage war over a city, each desiring to capture it and rule over it, that is, to govern its inhabitants according to his will so that they obey him in all that he decrees for them, so do the two souls - the G‑dly [soul] and the animal [soul] - wage war against each other over the body and all its organs and limbs. The desire and will of the G‑dly soul is that it alone should rule over the person and direct him, and that all his limbs should obey it and surrender themselves completely to it and become a vehicle for it, and serve as a vehicle for its ten faculties [of intellect and emotion] and three "garments" [thought, speech and action]... and the entire body should be permeated with them alone, to the exclusion of any alien influence, G‑d forbid... While the animal soul desires the very opposite." - Shneur Zalman of Liadi
"In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions. " - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"Truth is s thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time, nor does it take away the freedom of speech which proceeds from justice; but it gives to us the knowledge of what is just and lawful, separating from them the unjust and refuting them." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"It must never be forgotten, however, that the Bill of Rights was the child of the Enlightenment. Back of the guarantee of free speech lay faith in the power of an appeal to reason by all the peaceful means for gaining access to the mind. It was in order to avert force and explosions due to restrictions upon rational modes of communication that the guarantee of free speech was given a generous scope. But utterance in a context of violence can lose its significance as an appeal to reason and become part of an instrument of force. Such utterance was not meant to be sheltered by the Constitution." - Felix Frankfurter
"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker." - Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey
"The game of status seeking, organized around committees, is played in roughly the same fashion in Africa and in America and in the Soviet Union. Perhaps the aptitude for this game is a part of our genetic inheritance, like the aptitude for speech and for music. The game has had profound consequences for science. In science, as in the quest for a village water supply, big projects bring enhanced status; small projects do not. In the competition for status, big projects usually win, whether or not they are scientifically justified. As the committees of academic professionals compete for power and influence, big science becomes more and more preponderant over small science. The large and fashionable squeezes out the small and unfashionable. The space shuttle squeezes out the modest and scientifically more useful expendable launcher. The Great Observatory squeezes out the Explorer. The centralized adduction system squeezes out the village well. Fortunately, the American academic system is pluralistic and chaotic enough that first-rate small science can still be done in spite of the committees. In odd corners, in out-of the-way universities, and in obscure industrial laboratories, our Fulanis are still at work. " - Freeman John Dyson
"If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." - George Washington
"Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard." - Hélène Cixous
"It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own." - Herbert Hoover, fully Herbert Clark Hoover
"Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress." - Isocrates NULL
"Religious education in the true sense is to encourage the child to understand his own relationship to people, to things and to nature. There is no existence without relationship; and without self-knowledge, all relationship, with the one and with the many, brings conflict and sorrow. Of course, to explain this fully to a child is impossible; but if the educator and the parents deeply grasp the full significance of relationship, then by their attitude, conduct and speech they will surely be able to convey to the child, without too many words and explanations, the meaning of a spiritual life." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. When the ocean is searching for you, don't walk into the language-river. Listen to the ocean, and bring your talky business to an end Traditional words are just babbling in that presence, and babbling is a substitute for sight." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"When speech is given to a soul holy and true, time, and its dome of ages, becomes as a mighty whispering-gallery, round which the imprisoned utterance runs, and reverberates forever. " - James Martineau
"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father." - Jules Feiffer, fully Jules Ralph Feiffer