Quotes About Speakers

“Ironically, pretending that parenting is easy diminishes the value of family. As truth seekers and truth speakers, we need to be honest about the cost of parenting.”

— Leslie Leyland Fields

“Vianello had the knack of getting people to talk. Especially if they were Venetians, the people he interviewed invariably warmed to this large, sweet-tempered man who gave every appearance of speaking Italian reluctantly, who was only too glad to lapse into their common dialect, a linguistic change that often carried its speakers along to unconscious revelation.”

— Donna Leon

“Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.”

— Jonathan Safran Foer

“The basic 110-volt AC power line moves the electrons at 60 cycles. If a transformer is close to the power source (and all speakers have transformers), the 60 cycles produce an audible hum. Crackling, caused by dirt on the sound head, can also be heard.”

— Sidney Lumet

“I thought speakers didn't believe in sin," said a sullen boy.
Andrew smiled. "You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.”

— Orson Scott Card

“She stood in front of the speakers instead and closed her eyes, not really dancing, just bouncing and whispering the lyrics. After the first verse, she was dancing.”

— Rainbow Rowell

“A person's native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.12 As evidence, speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92 percent of Mandarin speakers who began the music lessons at or before the age of five had perfect pitch compared to 8 percent of English speakers with comparable music training.”

— Ken Robinson

“The intercom crackled. Buford's Mini-Hedge yelled over the speakers, PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!”

— Rick Riordan

“Is there anything in the world better than words on the page? Magic signs, the voices of the dead, building blocks to make wonderful worlds better than this one, comforters, companions in loneliness. Keepers of secrets, speakers of the truth ... all those glorious words.”

— Cornelia Funke

“What then, is correctness of speech but the maintenance of the practice of others, as established by the authority of ancient speakers? But the weaker men are, the more they are troubled by such matters. Their weakness stems from a desire to appear learned, not with a knowledge of things, by which we are edified, but with a knowledge of signs, by which it is difficult not to be puffed up in some way; even a knowledge of things often makes people boastful, unless their necks are held down by the Lord's yoke.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“English is not merely a language anymore; it has become a way of life for millions of non-native English speakers around the world.”

— M.F. Moonzajer

“I want my music to jump off the stage and out of the speakers. When we do 'Rain Is A Good Thing' paired back to back with 'Country Girl,' it just feels like the roof is fixin' to come off the place.”

— Luke Bryan

“Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, 'Look, I made a career out of carefully and craftfully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers.'”

— Skrillex

“All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.”

— Bernard Pivot

“The best sounds a kid will get is in a movie theater, with huge speakers, turned up loud. I always mix my music really loud. I don't care if you don't hear all the dialogue. The audience are not idiots.”

— John Hughes

“When you're in a band, you spend the first four hundred thousand years of your career dragging around your own crap. Your speakers, speaker stands, mixing head, mics, pickups, power cables, mic cables, speaker cables, instruments, the everything. You forget something, you're screwed. You break something, you're screwed. You don't have a long enough extension cord? Screwed.
Once you hit it big, though
You're packing your shit into a late-model Mustang and a pickup truck and hoping you didn't forget anything.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“This was the dream: sitting in the passenger seat of Joseph Kavinsky's Mitsubishi, the odor of a crash clinging to Ronan's clothing, the white dash lights carving Kavinsky a gaunt and wild face, foully seductive lyrics spitting from the speakers, the vein-covered peaks of Kavinsky's knuckles on the gearshift between them.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“Cole," I breathed, "what have you done to yourself?"
The wolf's head jerked back toward its shoulders, again and again.
Cole sang from the speakers, his voice slow and uncertain against a sparse backing of just piano, a different Cole than I'd ever heard:
If I am Hannibal
where are my Alps?”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“I think 2014 for me is going to give me the possibility to do even bigger things than anyone has done. I want to change the party scene - like, stop just being a DJ with lights, a big LED screen, and oh-look-at-me speakers. There's way more to a party, and I think everyone knows it. I want to make it special.”

— Afrojack

“Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with the public will convince them as he himself appears convinced.”

— Jonathan Swift

“Before I'd written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.”

— Joan Didion

“Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.”

— Steven Pinker

“The soundtrack of our time togeter, our short life together, has faded away as the last song on the album ends. All I can hear anymore is the smooth vibration of silence coming from the speakers. I feel like all I want to do us reach out and start it over again, but my hand won't move to press the button.”

— J.A. Redmerski

“The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue; but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. And their audiences also do not seem to regard themselves as predestined to rule; they clap as if in defiance, and laugh at their enemies behind their hands, with the shrill laughter of children. They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity. In fact, they want to receive the Eucharist, be beaten by the Turks, and then go to heaven.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desk for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it. Interviewers propose to speed up this process
by trepanning writers, so to speak, and fishing around in their brains for unused ideas which otherwise might never get out of there. Not a single idea has ever been discovered by means of this brutal method
and still the trepanning of authors goes on every day.
I now refuse all those who wish to take the top off my skull yet again. The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“I had hooked up my iPod to the speakers. The air was filled with the raw, sexy purr of Etta James. "The thing that's great about the blues," I told Luke, pausing to sip from my glass of wine, "is that it's about feeling, loving, wanting without the brakes on. No one's brave enough to live that way. Except maybe musicians.”

— Lisa Kleypas

“While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.”

— Stacy Schiff

“I'm a nature lover, I want at any given time to be able to bring lots of plants into my house, have lots of light flooding in, have lots of natural elements. Reclaimed lumbers, actual live edge slab tables. I do love technology, but I want the TV to be hidden away a little, I want the speakers to be up on the ceiling.”

— Sebastian Clovis

“We have not been impressed with any attribute of the Senate other than its appearance and manners. We have heard the best speakers: they all fire off speeches which deal with the entire subject in general terms and which do not attempt to debate, to answer opponents' arguments or offer new points for discussion. And the speeches are constantly degenerating into empty rhetoric; they abound in quotations from well-known authors or from their own former speeches.”

— Beatrice Webb

“Speakers have been showering us with pearls of wisdom for centuries, and if all of their valuable advice were laid end to end, it would still be just as good as new. Very little of it has ever been used.”

— Benjamin Franklin Fairless

“Lyrics are weak, like clock radio speakers.”

— GZA

“The theory behind AltConf is simple: it's worth being in town for WWDC, even if you don't have tickets, and if you're already there, you might as well go to the conference next door. The reality of what AltConf has become is an important addition to the very controlled stream of information Apple provides. Some of the industry's best speakers don't work at Apple, and some of the industry's most important topics aren't being discussed by Hair Force One.”

— Mike Lee

“On the one hand, there is no question that English - frequently bad English - has become the universal language of scholarship. It is clearly a tremendous handicap for people outside of the United States, Britain, and Australia and a few other countries because few of them are native speakers, but we demand that they present and publish in English.”

— Henry Rosovsky

“Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.”

— Charlton Laird

“Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.”

— Peter Farb

“Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize the speakers from the picture alone.”

— Peter Farb

“There are two types of speakers: those that
are nervous and those that are liars.”

— Mark Twain

“Above all, translators must be native speakers. It's not because they speak the language better
I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with having an intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated.”

— Sergei Lukyanenko

“I've always been very involved with environmental issues. I was fortunate to be one of the speakers at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero some years back, and Bruce Johnson and I served on the board of the Surfrider Foundation here at home. Locally and globally, we need to be doing everything we can to help Mother Earth.”

— Mike Love

“Walking back from the convention site I chatted with a normal Bostonian for several blocks
who must have identified me through our covert system of signals. He was mostly bemused by the Democrats' primetime speakers and told me he used to be an independent, but for the last 20 years found himself voting mostly Republican. Then he corrected himself and said he votes for the American.”

— Ann Coulter

“When I listen to great music, the first thing I wonder is what people were saying when this came out of the speakers in the studio. I want to know what happened when they played it and said, "This is the one!"”

— Jay-Z

“It(Boston Bombings) was worth it to hear you(survivor speakers) speak.”

— Joe Biden

“When there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loud-speakers.”

— Paul Goodman

“The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.”

— Toni Morrison

“A deaf and dumb person who sees two men in conversation - may nevertheless understand from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, how well their discussion is getting along.”

— Leonardo Da Vinci

“America already holds the record for freak movements. Now we have a new one. It's called "Restoring Confidence." Rich men who never had a mission in life outside of watching a stock ticker are working day and night "restoring confidence." Writers are working night shifts, speakers' tables are littered up, ministers are preaching statistics, all on "restoring confidence."”

— Will Rogers

“Good speakers usually find when they finish that there have been four versions of the speech: the one they delivered, the one they prepared, the one the newspapers say was delivered, and the one on the way home they wish they had delivered.”

— Dale Carnegie

“Metaphor ... is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.”

— Laura Riding