We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere i...n the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want ... everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear ... anywhere in the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, ...or in good order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's ...intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually re...peat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real th...an nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the ...invention of speech.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty... of speech and thought, we could probably get it--Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States--but do we want it? In these years we will see.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »