Speech Etiquette Quotes

Keep skid chains on your tongue. Say less than you think. Cultivate a pleasant voice. How you say it is often more important than what you say.

He who does not know how to be silent will not know how to speak.

My great grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.

Cell phones are like a dog's nipples... you don't have to shout into them!

When Prince Charles speaks, everybody pretends to be fascinated, even though he has never said anything interesting except in that intercepted telephone conversation wherein he expressed the desire to be a feminine hygeine product.

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

He who wears unclean garments, has dirty teeth, is a glutton, speaks unkindly and sleeps after sunrise - although he may be the greatest personality - will lose the favour of Lakshmi.

It's always an interesting experience for a politician to be heard in silence, I have to say.

There's a fashion abroad generally to speak the language as badly as possible. I'm of a mind to start a society for the reinstatement of the letter 't' and the banishment of the glottal stop.

Speak not injurious words neither in jest nor earnest; scoff at none, although they give occasion.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

I was playing Russell Long, the senator from Louisiana. I had 12 speech teachers watching me. All the other passengers on the airplane were speech teachers, and every time I got it wrong, one of the speech teachers would jump up and correct it.

Take some elocution lessons; you can joke with Ebonics, but the truth is, nothing beats the King's English. Learning how to speak properly, and the art of delivery can take you very far in life!

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound 'proper' were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass.

Everyone breathes in air, but it's a wise person who knows when to use that air to speak and when to exhale in silence.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so' you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'

I'm very much aware of the need for politicians to be careful with language as well as what they do.