Speak Up Quotes

1. "— and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman's voice speaks to her — so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer."
Author: Ahdaf Soueif

2. "All men believe in the soul and act accordingly, even if they do not always speak up. If somebody has committed a murder and admits it, but insists that he did it unintentionally, what follows then with the prosecutor, the defense, the witnesses, the experts, and the court? Why do they deliver learned speeches, analyze every detail, and so on, when the very deed has been admitted to and its consequences are evident? All their efforts are not concerned with external objective facts, but with an inner problem: that of intention. It is not a question of what actually happened, but what happened in the heart of the murderer. Moreover, everyone involved in the case spontaneously believes that the intention is more important than the consequences. That means that everyone, maybe unconsciously, prefers the soul to the facts."
Author: Alija Izetbegovic

3. "I know how it is to live your life like a dream. To listen and watch, to wake up and try to understand what has already happened. You do not need a psychiatrist to do this. A psychiatrist does not want you to wake up. He tells you to dream some more, to find the pond and pour more tears into it. And really, he is just another bird drinking from your misery. My mother, she suffered. She lost her face and tried to hind it. She found only greater misery and finally could not hide that. There is nothing more to understand. that was China. That was what people did back then. They had no choice. they could not speak up. they could not run away. That was their fate."
Author: Amy Tan

4. "Simply recognizing the need for change does not define leadership. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees…A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent."
Author: Andy Stanley

5. "In all your dealings with one another, speak the truth in love, that you may grow up."
Author: Anonymous

6. "This is said to civilized men who are to venture into countries where sacred cows are fed, while children are left to starve - where female infants are killed or abandoned by the roadside- where men go blind, medical help being forbidden by their religion - where women are mutilated, to insure their fidelity - where unspeakable tortures are ceremonially inflicted on prisoners - where cannibalism is practiced.Are these the ‘cultural riches' which a Western man is to greet with ‘brotherly love'? Are these the ‘valuable elements' which he is to admire and adopt? Are these the ‘fields' in which he is not to regard himself as superior? And when he discovers entire populations rotting alive in such conditions, is he not to acknowledge, with a burning stab of pride - of pride and gratitude - the achievements of his nation and his culture, of the men who created them and left him a nobler heritage to carry forward?"
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "Speak up! We live in a democracy. We all need to make sure our voices are heard and our opinions are known."
Author: Bill Lipinski

8. "Apply the blacksmith's homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say—fill your mind with your speech-material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears."
Author: Dale Carnegie

9. "If philosophy had the power to establish incontrovertible truths, immune to doubt, and if philosophers were as a rule wholly disinterested practitioners of their art, then it might be possible to speak of progress in philosophy. In fact, however, the philosophical tendencies and presuppositions of any age are, to a very great degree, determined by the prevailing cultural mood or by the ideological premises generally approved of my the educated classes. As often as not, the history of philosophy has been a history of prejudices masquerading as principles, and so merely a history of fashion. It is as possible today to be an intellectually scrupulous Platonist as it was more than two thousand years ago; it is simply not in vogue."
Author: David Bentley Hart

10. "Ubuntu [...] speaks of the very essence of being human. [We] say [...] "Hey, so-and-so has ubuntu." Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, "My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours." We belong in a bundle of life. We say, "A person is a person through other persons."[...] A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are."
Author: Desmond Tutu

11. "When, indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect - they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul - not of intellect, or of heart."
Author: Edgar Allan Poe

12. "We may not say that we have the answers. Questions of how to conduct oneself as a Christian, or how to serve as a Christian, must be answered by life itself- the life of the individual in his direct responsible relationship to God. This is a dynamic, never a static thing. And how can we speak at all of the true meaning of conduct and service if we do not speak first and last of love? For it is love which sums up all other commands. The one who loves knows better than anyone else how to conduct himself, how to serve the one he loves. Love prescribes an answer in a given situation as no mere rule can do."
Author: Elisabeth Elliot

13. "Oh!s little bird told us,' said Miss Browning. Molly knew that little bird from her childhood, and had always hated it, and longed to wring its neck. Why could not people speak out and say that they did not mean to give up the name of their informant?"
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

14. "Good is towing the line, being behaved, being quiet, being passive, fitting in, being liked, and great is being messy, having a belly, speaking your mind, standing up for what you believe in, fighting for another paradigm, not letting people talk you out of what you know to be true."
Author: Eve Ensler

15. "We are here in a wood of little beeches: And the leaves are like black lace Against a sky of nacre. One bough of clear promise Across the moon. It is in this wise that God speaketh unto me. He layeth hands of healing upon my flesh, Stilling it in an eternal peace, Until my soul reaches out myriad and infinite hands Toward him, And is eased of its hunger. And I know that this passes: This implacable fury and torment of men, As a thing insensate and vain: And the stillness hath said unto me, Over the tumult of sounds and shaken flame, Out of the terrible beauty of wrath, I alone am eternal. One bough of clear promise Across the moon"
Author: Frederic Manning

16. "Here is why I will be a good person. Because I listen. I cannot speak so I listen very well. I never interrupt, I never deflect the course of the conversation with a comment of my own....I beg of you, pretend you are a dog like me and LISTEN to other people rather than steal their stories."
Author: Garth Stein

17. "5. Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still really young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school.6. Television puts a stop to crime because all the burglars and robbers, instead of going to burgle and rob, sit at home watching The Lone Ranger, Emergency Ward Ten and Dotto."
Author: George Mikes

18. "Records that were the sound of somebody - more often than not, a she - speaking with a voice that had never been heard before. Somebody who'd never had the nerve to speak up before. I felt: 'I wanna meet these people.' Which is unusual for me: I don't usually want to meet the people who are making music that I like. But they sounded interesting."
Author: Greil Marcus

19. "There was a zone she had not explored. She could use the same counter, the same sort of password that she used with all these people, but she had passed over in the twinkling of an eye into another forest. This forest was reality. There, the very speaking of the words, conjured up answering sigil, house and barn and terrace and castle and river and little plum tree. A whole world was open. She looked in through a wide doorway."
Author: H.D.

20. "Master, dear master,' he said, but Frodo did not speak. As he had run forward, eager, rejoicing to be free, Shelob with hideous speed had come behind and with one swift stroke had stung him in the neck. He lay now pale, and heard no voice, and did not move.'Master, dear master!' said Sam, and through a long silence waited, listening in vain.Then as quickly as he could he cut away the binding cords and laid his head upon Frodo's breast and to his mouth, but no stir of life could he find, nor feel the faintest flutter of the heart. Often he chafed his master's hands and feet, and touched his brow, but all were cold.'Frodo, Mr. Frodo!' he called. 'Don't leave me here alone! It's your Sam calling. Don't go where I can't follow! Wake up, Mr. Frodo! O wake up, Frodo, me dear, me dear. Wake up!"
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

21. "If indeed it's a raceThen the chicks do the mostIt isn't a bragOr an estrogen boastIt's the women who've led meWith big open heartsIf not for their loveI'd have failed at the start.And it's not just the mothersI speak of them ALLIt's a woman there first When somebody falls.The multi of taskingThat's easy to teaseI dare a great manTo try it all, PLEASE!So this is my shout outMy rallying cryTo women all overI hold you up highAnd though there are othersWho'll think this poem strangeIt's the women who plantThe root of big change."
Author: Jamie Lee Curtis

22. "Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient."
Author: Jane Austen

23. "So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out."
Author: Jim Hightower

24. "But all over-expression, whether by journalists, poets, novelists, or clergymen, is bad for the language, bad for the mind; and by over-expression, I mean the use of words running beyond the sincere feeling of writer or speaker or beyond what the event will sanely carry. From time to time a crusade is preached against it from the text: ‘The cat was on the mat.' Some Victorian scribe, we must suppose, once wrote: ‘Stretching herself with feline grace and emitting those sounds immemorially connected with satisfaction, Grimalkin lay on a rug whose richly variegated pattern spoke eloquently of the Orient and all the wonders of the Arabian Nights.' And an exasperated reader annotated the margin with the shorter version of the absorbing event. How the late Georgian scribe will express the occurrence we do not yet know. Thus, perhaps: ‘What there is of cat is cat is what of cat there lying cat is what on what of mat laying cat.' The reader will probably the margin with ‘Some cat!"
Author: John Galsworthy

25. "The only way change will ever happen is if we speak up, and we have to know that it actually has an impact. Because we have a lot more power than we think we do, I think."
Author: Josh Brolin

26. "I do have a mouth - I will say. I speak up when I see things I don't care for."
Author: Kelly Bishop

27. "How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devastation."
Author: Lorrie Moore

28. "It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery."
Author: Ludwig Van Beethoven

29. "You speak of being afraid. Yet fear is something you generate in yourself, from your mind's lack of control; and you will learn to look at it and discover for yourself when you choose to be afraid. The first thing you must do is acknowledge that the fear is yours, and you can bid it come and go at will. Begin with this; whenever you feel fear that prevents choice say to yourself: 'What has made me feel fear? Why have I chosen to feel this fear preventing my choice, instead of feeling the freedom to choose?' Fear is a way of not allowing yourself to choose freely what you will do next; a way of letting your body's reflexes, not the needs of your mind, choose for you. ...[Y]ou have chosen to do nothing, so that none of the things you fear will come upon you; so your choices are not made by you but by your fear. ... I cannot promise to free you of your fear, only that a time will come when you are the master, and fear will not paralyze you."
Author: Marion Zimmer Bradley

30. "The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels."
Author: Mark Twain

31. "I thank you, Walton," he said, "for your kind intentions towards to miserable a wretch; but when you speak of new ties and fresh affections think you that any can replace those who are gone? Can any man be to me as Clerval was, or any woman another Elizabeth? Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives." -- Victor Frankenstein; Frankenstein"
Author: Mary Shelley

32. "You may stay. But Jessica, please watch what you say and do. Don't look them in the eyes for long. Speak only when spoken to. Yes, sir; yes, ma'am.""Sit up. Arf," I teased."What about her?" Jessica cried, pointing in my general direction. "She's more in need of an etiquette lesson than I am.""Yeah," I said, "but I'm the Queen. With a capital fucking Q. Hey, you're looking me in the eyes for too long! Eric, make her stop!"
Author: MaryJanice Davidson

33. "And when I say the Fashion Police, of course I'm speaking of the small group of screeching gay guys and fashion "experts" on that E! show led by the reanimated corpse of Joan Rivers."
Author: Mindy Kaling

34. "Elvis said, Miss Minnie, do you think it would be out of order if I go up and speak to General Stewart? I've always been such a fan of his. So Elvis went up to speak to the Stewarts."
Author: Minnie Pearl

35. "It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from "Secondly." Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with "Secondly," and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with "Secondly," and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims. It is enough to start with "Secondly," for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with "Secondly," and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British."
Author: Mourid Barghouti

36. "You speak in ignorant disdain of the foremost nation of the world," Yongxing said, growing angry himself, "like all your country-men, who show no respect for that which is superior, and insult our customs.""For which I might consider myself as owing you some apology, sir, if you yourself had not so often insulted myself and my own country, or shown respect for any customs other than your own," Laurence said."
Author: Naomi Novik

37. "Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems to open up to people passing by. An outdoor reader shares the pulse of a timeless urban conversation between the world and the written word."
Author: Nina Bernstein

38. "Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?""I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?"The doctor stared at him."I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?"
Author: Peter Clines

39. "Bush is a very poor impromptu speaker. He does fine in small groups but when speaking without a script in front of large groups or answering questions he wasn't prepped for, he has problems."
Author: Peter Schuyler

40. "Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion's den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can't get free of them and that's what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I've been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there's a story. And that's what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I'm in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did."
Author: Ray Bradbury

41. "It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind."
Author: Samuel R. Delany

42. "The man speaks Southern football, now shut up."
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

43. "(Speaking about ponies engaging in a game of running around and chasing a ball with "imaginary riders")Along with everything else about it, it seemed to be a parable for life. Going forwards and backwards and round in circles, striving ever forward only to have to run like crazy backwards to get the ball again, realizing that your enemy is after the same goal and you're actually helping him toward it and getting roughed up and possibly killed while you're at it but still feeling the comradeship of being in the game all together."
Author: Susan Trott

44. "When did speaking your beliefs become synonymous with forcing them upon others?"
Author: Ted Dekker

45. "The word "autism" still conveys a fixed and dreadful meaning to most people—they visualize a child mute, rocking, screaming, inaccessible, cut off from human contact. And we almost always speak of autistic children, never of autistic adults, as if such children never grew up, or were somehow mysteriously spirited off the planet, out of society."
Author: Temple Grandin

46. "Choosing with integrity means finding ways to speak up that honor your reality, the reality of others, and your willingness to meet in the center of that large field. It's hard sometimes."
Author: Terry Tempest Williams

47. "The beautiful has but one type, the ugly has a thousand. The fact is that the beautiful, humanly speaking, is merely form considered in its simplest aspect, in its most perfect symmetry, in its most entire harmony with our make-up. Thus the ensemble that it offers us is always complete, but restricted like ourselves. What we call the ugly, on the contrary, is a detail of a great whole which eludes us, and which is in harmony, not with man but with all creation. That is why it constantly presents itself to us in new but incomplete aspects..."
Author: Victor Hugo

48. "Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You're not allowed to speak your mind unless you're black, or unless you're a terrorist, or unless you're an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things."
Author: Wilbur Smith

49. "There is one crucial rule that must be followed in all creative meetings. Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up."
Author: William Goldman

50. "Commerce is considered by classical economists to be a positive-sumgame. The act of selling and buying always benefits both the sellerand the buyer. It is unfortunate that popular culture has propagatedthe Marxist myth that one person gains in business at the expense ofanother, that capitalism is evil because it is a zero-sum game—somebodywins while someone else loses. When liberals make the argumentthat capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are eitherspeaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous toprotect their interests. We have not had true free-market capitalismin this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economicsuccesses in this nation's history, it has been those times when peoplehave done something outside of the government's involvement. Everytime the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos,waste, and corruption."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

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