Quotes on Speakers

One of the speakers asked how many women had been harassed or abused sexually in their life? There were thousands of women in the audience, and almost every one of them raised her hand.

We cannot be speakers who do not listen. But neither can we be listeners who do not speak.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

Look at almost any passage, and you'll find that a paragraph has five or six metaphors in it. It's not that the speaker is trying to be poetic, it's just that that's the way language works.

Success is never owned, it is rented, and the rent is due every day.

On the day I started college in 1979, no woman had ever been on the United States Supreme Court or served as the Speaker of the House. None had been an astronaut or the solo anchor of a network evening news broadcast. Not one had been president of an Ivy League college or run a serious campaign for president.

There is only one excuse for a speaker's asking the attention of his audience: he must have either truth or entertainment for them.

An evil-speaker differs from an evil-doer only in the want of opportunity.

An important fact about verbal behavior is that speaker and listener may reside within the same skin.

For the great speakers, it's all about the audience. And the feeling they have is that they're giving a gift, of maybe knowledge or inspiration or motivation.

A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.

The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.

Radio affects most intimately, person-to-person, offering a world of unspoken communication between writer-speaker and the listener.

When you can't get a miracle, you can still be a miracle for someone else.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Most of the time in married life is taken up by talk.

When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

In Judith Barrington's striking collection, Horses and the Human Soul, human emotions come ushered and accompanied by animal companions, especially the horses this speaker loves. Here they are witnesses, companions to the spirit, and as vulnerably mortal as human beings. Socially and politically alert, lamenting and celebrating, Barrington's passionate poems inscribe the broad range of her affections.

Words belong to nobody, and in themselves they evaluate nothing. But they can serve any speaker and be used for the most varied and directly contradictory evaluations on the part of the speakers.

The spirit listens only when the speaker speaks in gestures. And gestures do not mean signs or body movements, but acts of true abandon, acts of largesse, of humor. As a gesture to the spirit, warriors bring out the best of themselves and silently offer it to the abstract.