U.S.A. is the slice of a continent.U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stock quotations rubbed out and written in bya Western Union boy on a black-board, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled in the margins in pencil.U.S.A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills.U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts.U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery.U.S.A. is the letters at theend of anaddresswhenyouareaway from home.But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people

-Dos Passos,John Roderigo
  U.S. A.,'U.S. A.' (new prologue to collected trilogy).

Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless; nay, the speech they have resolved not to make.

-Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans
  Felix Holt, ch.2.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.Your still fowl, blinking at youwithout remark, mayall thewhilebesittingonone addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

-Eliot, George pseudonym of  MaryAnn Evans
  Felix Holt, ch.15.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.1.

Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.2.

I think that people will concede that, on this of all days, I should begin my speech with the words,'My husband and I'.

-Elizabeth II
  Speech at a banquet to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary, 20 Nov.

   The speech is admirable, but the speaker is not to be trusted; for he has never been amid the blare of trumpets.

-Eudamidas   4c
Of a philosopher who had claimed that philosophers were the only good generals. Quoted in Plutarch  Apophthegmata Laconica, 220E (translated by F C Babbitt,1931).

Americaörather, the United Statesöseems to me to be the Jewamong the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm- hearted, overfriendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travellers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile.

-Ferber, Edna
  A Peculiar Treasure, ch.1.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fe"  le¤   o  u' nous battons des me¤  lodies a'   faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les e¤  toiles. Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when all the time we are longing to move the stars to pity.

-Flaubert, Gustave
  Madame Bovary, pt.1, ch.12.

That part of hisspeech wasrather like being savaged bya dead sheep.

-Healey, Denis Winston Healey, Baron
  Responding to a speechby Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Geoffrey Howe, House of Commons,  Jun.

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby†he has slowlyaccumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

-Huxley,T(homas) H(enry)
  Man's Place in Nature.

L'accent du pays o  u' l'on est ne¤   demeure dans l'esprit et dans le c½ur comme dans le langage. The accent of the place in which one was born lingers in the mind and in the heart as it does in one's speech.

-La Rochefoucauld, Fran c° ois, 6th Duc de
  Maximes, no.342.

Fashion is free speech, and one of the privileges, if not always one of the pleasures, of a free world.

-Lurie, Alison
The Language of Clothes.

Translation isthe paradigm, the exemplar of all writing† It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

-Mathews, Harry Burchell
  Country Cooking and Other Stories,'The Dialect of the Tribe'.

Speech is the small change of silence.

-Meredith, George
  The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, ch.34.

A speech is poetry: cadence, rhythm, imagery, sweep†and reminds us that words, like children, have the power to make dance the dullest beanbag of a heart.

-Noonan, Peggy
  What I Saw at the Revolution.

The era of free speech is closing down. The freedom of the press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion; still, so long asthe legal right tosay what you like exists, there are always loopholes for an unorthodox writer.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  In the New Leader, 24  Jun.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  'Politics and the English Language', collected in Shooting an Elephant (1950).

The controversy over freedom of speech and of the press is at the bottom a controversy over the desirability, or otherwise, of telling lies.What is really at issue is the right to report events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.

-Orwell, George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair
  'The Prevention of Literature', in Polemic,  Jan.

Our fathers have, in process of centuries, provided this realm, its colonies and wide dependencies, with a speech as malleable and pliant as Attic, dignified as Latin, masculine, yet free of Teutonic guttural, capable of being precise as French, dulcet as Italian, sonorous as Spanish, and captaining all these excellences to its service.

-Quiller-Couch, SirArthurThomas known as  'Q'
  The Oxford Book of EnglishVerse, preface.