Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.

Alissa Quart

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A master of improvised speech and improvised policies.

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing - when words won't do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern.

Aaron Sorkin

Work Music You

Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.

Abbie Hoffman

Theatre T Speech

Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech always sends me down some path, some trajectory of some creative idea.

Abigail Washburn

Art Ways Way

Extemporaneous speaking should be practiced and cultivated. It is the lawyer's avenue to the public. However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

Abraham Lincoln

Respect Faith Business

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

Adam Cohen

While Way Tom

I never had a speech from my father 'this is what you must do or shouldn't do' but I just learned to be led by example. My father wasn't perfect.

Adam Sandler

You Us T

I don't think about that. I wasn't a kid growing up saying one day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn't on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

Adam Sandler

Work Car Yin

I wasn't a kid growing up thinking, 'One day I'll get an Oscar and make a speech.' That wasn't on my mind.

Adam Sandler

Car Wing Win

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

Men Great Up

Batman had a certain speech pattern that I established because he was always Sherlock Holmes-ian. He was Basil Rathbone. In other words, he was always musing about something.

Adam West

Words Word Ways

Mum snuck me into speech and drama classes and into the National Youth Theatre and said I was going on a summer camp if Dad asked.

Adeel Akhtar

Youth You Theatre

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

Adlai Stevenson I

Would Wood Woo

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.

Adlai Stevenson II

Would Wood Woo

Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag's fundamental nature.

Adrian Cronauer

Nature Men Yin

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

Aeschylus

Yin Where T

I'll be giving a speech at the randomest place, like a bank or something, and a guy in a suit will say, 'I'm totally freaked out that I'm talking to the girl from 'Cremaster.' For the rest of my life, that movie will be playing in a museum somewhere. I never could have expected that huge response.

Aimee Mullins

Life Yin Will

The federal government has no business spending your hard-earned money on a project to monitor political speech on Twitter.

Ajit Pai

Money Men Government

In our Constitution, it is said that we have freedom of speech and freedom of expression. In my mind, unless that freedom is total, it is no freedom at all.

Akshaye Khanna

Freedom Unless UN

Ralph Nader is a hero. I know Ralph, and I call him up occasionally. He's helped me out on a couple of occasions when I've given speeches to corporations where he'd have a good... He'd give me some good information.

Al Franken

Good Where Up

Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is right there... she's in town because her father was at Johnson Smith College... and she was delivering a speech there.

Al Michaels

I make good money: One speech nets me more than what most people make in six months.

Alain Robert

What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for.

Alan Arkin

Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.

Alan Bullock

If I, as a liberal, didn't speak out against those who would squelch the free speech of conservatives, I wouldn't deserve to call myself a liberal.

Alan Colmes

I will continue to speak out against the views of both Limbaugh and Hannity when I feel it's warranted, meeting their free speech with my own. But I will never forget that, without them, I'd have a much smaller platform on which to do it.

Alan Colmes

There is no asterisk in the Constitution that says 'except for hate speech.'

Alan Colmes

Freedom of speech means freedom for those who you despise, and freedom to express the most despicable views. It also means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.

Alan Dershowitz

Being offended by freedom of speech should never be regarded as a justification for violence.

Alan Dershowitz

The law is agnostic about truth. It's very skeptical of ultimate truth. That's why freedom of speech permits lies to be told.

Alan Dershowitz

The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.

Alan Dershowitz

We don't have an Official Secrets Act in the United States, as other countries do. Under the First Amendment, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of association are more important than protecting secrets.

Alan Dershowitz

An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.

Alan K. Simpson

Voluntary public funding of elections solves the free speech 'problem' with more speech instead of more regulation: by giving qualified candidates who show broad-based constituent support enough matching public funds to mount a credible campaign.

Alan K. Simpson

We meet before the movie and she gives you charts with sounds on them and makes a tape of examples. While they are setting up the scene, I go with her to the trailer and we go through the scene and correct the speech.

Albert Finney

Automated call centers are only the most obvious way speech recognition will be used. The software is now becoming sophisticated enough to identify speakers through 'voiceprints,' akin to fingerprints, eventually reducing the need for personal identification numbers.

Alex Berenson

Big companies, which spend tens of billions of dollars annually on 'call centers' to take orders and provide customer support, increasingly rely on speech recognition not just to handle requests for information but to process customer orders.

Alex Berenson

A lot of families with kids with autism can't afford speech therapy for their children and can't afford to get them in the best schools for autism. We're trying to help make a difference in those communities.

Alex Bregman

Modern political speechwriting is not a high-minded pursuit for brilliant talents.

Alex Pareene

Modern political speechwriting is certainly a skill, and one that requires experience and practice to master.

Alex Pareene

The definition of hate speech in some countries is problematic.

Alex Stamos

The Internet and digital technologies can and will boost economic, social, and political development, including by vastly expanding the capacity of individuals to enjoy their right to freedom of speech and expression, which is key to empowering human rights.

Alexander De Croo

From my earliest childhood, my attention was specially directed to the subject of acoustics, and specially to the subject of speech, and I was urged by my father to study everything relating to these subjects, as they would have an important bearing upon what was to be my professional work.

Alexander Graham Bell

I'm a real believer in counter-speech when it comes to crazy stuff we don't like.

Alexis Ohanian

Guard your roving thoughts with a jealous care, for speech is but the dealer of thoughts, and every fool can plainly read in your words what is the hour of your thoughts.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Speech is human nature itself, with none of the artificiality of written language.

Alfred North Whitehead

Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.

Alice Hamilton

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

Alice Walker

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

Alison Gopnik

Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.

Alissa Quart