It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against ...
Excluding certain ideas and thoughts, calling them hate speech, is an important piece in the progressive movement’s puzzle. If you can’t win an argument logically, demonize your opponent, make him out to be a bad person and all of a sudden the id...
Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSA...
I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting." (Victory Sp...
We follow the ways of wolves, the habits of tigers: or, rather we are worse than they. To them nature has assigned that they should be thus fed, while God has honoured us with rational speech and a sense of equity. And yet we are become worse than th...
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights -- the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation – the right to breathe air as nature provided it -- the right of future generations to a healthy existence?" (...
Holly Gennero McClane: After all your posturing, all your little speeches, you're nothing but a common thief. Hans Gruber: I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane. And since I'm moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite.
Bill: OK, everybody. Grab your plates. Soup's on. Edward: [with mouth full] I thought this was shish-ka-bob. Bill: What? Edward: [a little clearer] I thought this was shish-ka-bob. Bill: Yeah, it is shish-ka-bob. It's a figure of speech, Ed.
[speaking to himself, practicing his speech] Luca Brasi: Don Corleone, I am honored and grateful that you have invited me to your home on the wedding day of your daughter. And may their first child be a masculine child. [then, starting over]
Myrtle Logue: What's the matter, love? Lionel Logue: [referring to the Duke of York] I'm just having trouble with a patient. Myrtle Logue: That isn't like you. Why? Lionel Logue: Scared. He's afraid of his own shadow . Myrtle Logue: Isn't that why th...
Linguini: [attempting to make an inspirational speech to the other cooks] Tonight is a big night. Appetite is coming, and he's gonna have a big ego. I mean, Ego! He's coming. The, the critic? And he's gonna order... something. Something from our menu...
The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally crea...
I just always knew I wanted to be an actor. I gave my Emmy acceptance speech when I was 11. But, I wasn't allowed to do plays and things like that. It was considered dangerous. My parents didn't think it was safe for a girl to do that, and they defin...
The problem with modern politics is everybody is doing sound bite stuff. In my stump speech, I give 20 minutes on why I think we're off track. And I think people do really want to engage in a serious high-level discussion on how to get the country ba...
Dou comigo a pensar se figuras de estilo não serão, afinal, as silhuetas dos corpos humanos que tão ardentemente desejamos ou abominamos. I find myself wondering if figures of speech are not, after all, the silhouettes of human bodies which we so ...
If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." (Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)
I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.
The fact the enemies of God must face is that modern civilization has conquered the world, but in doing so has lost its soul. And in losing its soul it will lose the very world it gained. Even our own so-called Liberal culture in these United States ...
It sounds strange, somewhat on the line between irony and absurdity, to think that people would rather label and judge something as significant as each other but completely bypass a peanut. ... World peace is only a dream because people won't allow t...
We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives - for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control - and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our w...
