87 Inspiring Speech Quotes

In a world where words hold immense power, the right speech can ignite inspiration, drive change, and transform perspectives. Whether delivered in the political arena, at monumental life events, or during intimate gatherings, inspiring speeches have the unique ability to resonate across time and generations. They transcend mere words, encapsulating passion, wisdom, and the human spirit. In this collection of 87 inspiring speech quotes, we've curated powerful excerpts that celebrate the art of oratory and highlight the timeless impact of spoken words. Dive in to explore these profound expressions and perhaps find a spark to fuel your own aspirations and endeavors.

1. “You never really learn much from hearing yourself speak.” - George Clooney

2. “I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.” - Octavia E. Butler

3. “A good traveler leaves no tracks. Good speech lacks fault-finding.” - Lao Tzu

4. “Mannerism, especially when it takes the form of recurrent word or phrase, is by no means easy to represent; there is but a hair's breadth between the point at which the reader delightfully recognizes is as a revealing habit of speech, and the point at which its iteration begin to weary him.” - Mary Lascelles

5. “Darkness promotes speech.” - Alberto Manguel

6. “My father always said that too many words cheapened the value of a man's speech.” - Patricia Briggs

7. “Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” - Toni Morrison

8. “from Bill Clinton speech- People are more impressed by the power of our example rather than the example of our power...” - Bill Clinton

9. “that your power of commandwith simple language wasone of the magnificent things ofour century.(from the poem: result)” - Charles Bukowski

10. “A choir is made up of many voices, including yours and mine. If one by one all go silent then all that will be left are the soloists.Don’t let a loud few determine the nature of the sound. It makes for poor harmony and diminishes the song.” - Vera Nazarian

11. “Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are "trying to tell us/... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossible to do.” - William Meredith

12. “No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.” - Ayn Rand

13. “I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.” - Howard Nemerov

14. “Think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that's what I've been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you've belched it out, you can't take it back. As grandma said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The interesting this is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.” - A.J. Jacobs

15. “Speech is the voice of the heart.” - Anna Quindlen

16. “I don't have an English accent because this is what English sounds like when spoken properly.” - Jimmy Carr

17. “That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.” - Barack Obama

18. “The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.” - Barack Obama

19. “Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.” - Barack Obama

20. “To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” - Barack Obama

21. “So yes, I say things I regret constantly, and I just can't help it.” - Kathy Griffin

22. “Listen to the trees as they sway in the wind.Their leaves are telling secrets. Their bark sings songs of olden days as it grows around the trunks. And their roots give names to all things.Their language has been lost.But not the gestures.” - Vera Nazarian

23. “Not in his speech, not in his thoughts, I see his greatness, only in his actions, in his life.” - Hermann Hesse

24. “Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity, than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity.” - Stephen Fry

25. “I really look forward to that insane hour that we spend together. I really do.” - Colin Farrell

26. “Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.” - Muriel Barbery

27. “Be sure that you speak with unfeigned lips.” - Marie de France

28. “The thing he said aloud did not succeed.” - Tony Burgess

29. “A comment that starts with the words "I think" usually means the opposite.” - Jack Gardner

30. “I guess we speak pretty loosely, don't we, about looking forward to the Ashes and all that—and we are, but it's not with both eyes. We've got one eye on that and one eye on what we need to get in place to make sure we're the best team we can be for November.” - Ricky Ponting

31. “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” - A.J. Liebling

32. “I wondered why humans were even given the gift of speech at all. We no longer needed it; we’ve forgotten to talk about anything. We only waste it.” - Rasmenia Massoud

33. “We're the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know, a long time ago!” - Taylor Mali

34. “I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone, and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The airplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say, do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish. Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written that the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people. Now let us fight to fulfill that promise. Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness. Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!” - Charlie Chaplin

35. “To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.” - Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus / Traeg

36. “Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.” - Samuel Beckett

37. “His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.” - J.M. Coetzee

38. “The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.” - Don DeLillo

39. “What constitutes an American? Not color nor race nor religion. Not the pedigree of his family nor the place of his birth. Not the coincidence of his citizenship. Not his social status nor his bank account. Not his trade nor his profession. An American is one who loves justice and believes in the dignity of man. An American is one who will fight for his freedom and that of his neighbor. An American is one who will sacrifice property, ease and security in order that he and his children may retain the rights of free men. An American is one in whose heart is engraved the immortal second sentence of the Declaration of Independence.” - Harold Ickes

40. “Men employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.” - Voltaire

41. “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.” - Thomas Carlyle

42. “Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.” - George Eliot

43. “Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their responsibilities have been decreed by our species... the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” - John Steinbeck

44. “His forward voice now is to speak well of his friend. His backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract.” - William Shakespeare

45. “Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.” - Criss Jami

46. “Everyone has their own ways of expression. I believe we all have a lot to say, but finding ways to say it is more than half the battle.” - Criss Jami

47. “Speech is for the convenience of those who are hard of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout.” - Henry David Thoreau

48. “Keeping demons from this world is your mandate, a mandate from heaven. And a mandate from heaven isn't something you can just ignore.” - Cassandra Clare

49. “For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.” - Charles Dickens

50. “Such is the state of things in England, and it is well that it should be realised by all of us; but it must not be supposed for a moment that I am afraid of it. I lament it deeply, because I foresee that it may be the ruin of many souls; but I have no fear at all that it really can do aught of serious harm to the Word of God, to Holy Church, to our Almighty King, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Faithful and True, or to His Vicar on earth. Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves His elect inheritance. Sometimes our enemy is turned into a friend; sometimes he is despoiled of that special virulence of evil which was so threatening; sometimes he falls to pieces of himself; sometimes he does just so much as is beneficial, and then is removed. Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties, in confidence and peace; to stand still and to see the salvation of God.” - John Henry Newman

51. “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” - Barry Goldwater

52. “Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them.” - Laura Esquivel

53. “You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it” - Criss Jami

54. “Sound has a profound effect on the senses. It can be both herd and felt. It can even be seen with the mind’s eye. It can almost be tasted and smelled. Sound can evoke responses of the five senses. Sound can paint a picture, produce a mood, trigger the senses to remember another time and place. From infancy we hear sound with our entire bodies. When I hear my own name, I have as much a sense of it entering my body through my back or my hand or my chest as through my ears. Sound speaks to the sensorium; the entire system of nerves that stimulates sensual responce.” - Louis E. Colaianni

55. “Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.” - Siri Hustvedt

56. “He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.” - Henry Adams

57. “Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,Few come within the compass of my curse,—Wherein I did not some notorious ill,As kill a man, or else devise his death,Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,Set deadly enmity between two friends,Make poor men's cattle break their necks;Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,And bid the owners quench them with their tears.Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful thingsAs willingly as one would kill a fly,And nothing grieves me heartily indeedBut that I cannot do ten thousand more.” - William Shakespeare

58. “If everything you say gets laughed at... then you become afraid of everyone... and are no longer able to speak... even knowing all that does is bother everyone... Your heart.......shuts down... And your words die....” - Natsuki Takaya

59. “A leader whose speech is prepared by others is not a leader; he is just an empty and stupid bottle! Use your own ideas and your own brain; write your own speech, just like Gandhi, Churchill or Nehru! That is indeed a good ethics and a good honour!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

60. “speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks.” - Margaret Atwood

61. “...you have been fraternizing with warewolves overmuch! Military men can be terribly bad for one's verbal concatenation!” - Gail Carriger

62. “Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.” - George Eliot

63. “Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.” - Paul Celan

64. “Someone heroic and valiant, not merely skilled in speech; someone who is kind and pure in heart. Someone who does not play with white roses that belong to others.” - Sarah Mally

65. “Tim Tebow's Dad turned a screw-up into a testimony when a fire to burn weeds in a field got out of control. With his family still smelling like smoke from containing the fire, he conducted a lesson from verses where James compares danger of speech to an out-of-control spark.” - Tim Tebow

66. “Nam eloquentiam quae admirationem non habet nullam iudico” - Marcus Tulius Cicero

67. “He had a voice you couldn't miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.” - Arnold Schwarzenegger

68. “[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” - Gustave Flaubert

69. “The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole.” - G.K. Chesterton

70. “There is great worth in holding universal truths and timelessly beautiful words in your heart, which will stay there forever, infusing your thoughts and speech…” - Dan Stevens

71. “Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.” - Ferdinand de Saussure

72. “Why must you speak your thoughts? Silence, if fair words stick in your throat, would serve all our ends better.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

73. “And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for the health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care.I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own.” - Barack Obama

74. “Fuck the lot of you and your hypocritical bullshit. You sit around spouting brotherhood. You don't know the first thing about being a brother. Or being a man. Because a real man sure as hell would never have disrespected a woman the way each and everyone of you have disrespected Maysie.” - A. Meredith Walters

75. “Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study [Lionel Logue said]” - Mark Logue

76. “I want everyone to get plenty of rest tonight, because tomorrow, we make plans to bury the new council chair. And don't worry about the shovel shortage," I said, glancing from face to determined face. "Because Calvin Malone has dug his own grave.” - Rachel Vincent

77. “I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.” - Neil Gaiman

78. “Let justice be done tho the heavens fall.” - Michael Davitt

79. “If a man hasn’t found something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

80. “Sometimes it's not what you say, Valkyrie, it's just the fact that you're saying it.” - Derek Landy

81. “The playwright's rendition of Abraham Lincoln remembers a pitiful little paddlewheel he saw that he could only generate steam to EITHER blow the ship's whistle OR move the wheel. Just as the little ship could not do both, Lincoln fears that very few can actually think and speak at the same time.” - Norman Corwin

82. “I don't pretend to know everything; I just only speak on matters I know I'll win.” - Criss Jami

83. “Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.” - Thornton Wilder

84. “The essence of America – that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion – it is an idea — and what an idea it is: That you can come from humble circumstances and do great things. That it doesn’t matter where you came from but where you are going.” - Condoleezza Rice

85. “Speechlessness, however, affirmed in the diagnosis, is carefully based on the facts of the examination, as we see by rendering the statements concerned, just as they stand in examination and diagnosis: "If thou examinest a man having a wound in the temple, ...; if thou ask of him concerning his malady and he speak not to thee; ...; thou shouldst say concerning him, 'One having a wound in his temple, ... (and) he is speechless'.” - James Henry Breasted

86. “Don't bother to argue anything on the Internet. And I mean, ANYTHING.... The most innocuous, innocent, harmless, basic topics will be misconstrued by people trying to deconstruct things down to the sub-atomic level and entirely miss the point.... Seriously. Keep peeling the onion and you get no onion.” - Vera Nazarian

87. “Even Dionysus's welcome-home speech wasn't enough to dampen my spirits. "Yes, yes, so the little brat didn't get himself killed and now he'll have an even bigger head. Well, huzzah for that. In other announcements, there will be no canoe races this Saturday....” - Rick Riordan