"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)

"Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
— Benjamin Franklin

"Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence."
— Spanish proverb

"I done learned my mistake and learned to do what's right by it. You still trying to get something for nothing. Life don't owe you nothing. You owe it to yourself"
— August Wilson (Fences)

"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion."
— John Lawton

"The first rule of my speaking is: listen!"
— Larry King

""Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day,""
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Almost nothing need be said when you have eyes."
— Tarjei Vesaas (The Boat in the Evening)

"I used to be a Catholic, and when I first started police work, I worried about that. I saw a lot of people dead or dying for no apparent reason . . . not people I killed, just people. Little kids who'd drowned, people dying in auto accidents and with heart attacks and strokes. I saw a lineman burn to death, up on a pole, little bits and pieces, and nobody could help . . . . I watched them go, screaming and crying and sometimes just lying there with their tongues stuck out, heaving, with all the screaming and hollering from friends and relatives . . . and I never saw anyone looking beyond. I think, Michael, I think they just blink out. That's all. I think they go where the words on a computer screen go, when you turn it off. One minute they exist, maybe they're even profound, maybe the result of a great deal of work. The next . . . . Whiff. Gone."
— John Sandford (Eyes Of Prey)

"A Toastmaster who doesn't want to speak is like a Musician who doesn't want to compose music. "
— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

"Joining Toastmasters and avoiding to speak is like getting married and avoiding sex."
— Harwinder Singh Bhatia

"I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good."
— Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)

"The customer is always right' may have become a standard motto in the world of business, but the idea that 'the audience is always right,' has yet to make much of an impression on the world of presentation, even though for the duration of the presentation at least, the audience is the speaker's only customer."
— Max Atkinson (Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations)

"...talk is an art and a pleasure, not a matter of mere use and need."
— ursula k le guin