Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.
Susan Sontag

Both free speech rights and property rights belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.
Thomas Sowell

And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history.
David Icke

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.
Adam Smith

Marks on paper are free - free speech - press - pictures all go together I suppose.
Georgia O'Keeffe

But please know, whether you believe campaign contributions are speech or property, that I learned to love very dearly the right of free expression when I lived without that freedom for a while a long time ago.
John McCain

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

Black leadership has to recognize that principles more than speech, character more than a claim, is greater in advancing the cause of our liberation than what has transpired thus far.
Louis Farrakhan

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn

All the big powers they've silenced me. So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right.
Jack Kevorkian

My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.
Fran Lebowitz

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
John Kenneth Galbraith

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson

I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.
Aeschylus

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.
Thomas Carlyle

Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
Thomas Carlyle

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