A Quote by Francis Bacon

Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen. — © Francis Bacon
Speech of yourself ought to be seldom and well chosen.
Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen...
A well-chosen complication should give you choices. Juggling choices for your characters is what makes writing fun, after all. If you discover that you're struggling more than you ought to with a draft, perhaps you've run out of interesting choices, or have given yourself too few choices to begin with. Go back to the complication, fatten it up, and start over.
A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.
You will do very well to refuse offices; for a man seldom fails to give offense in them. It ought to weary you simply to hear them mentioned.
Speech is protected in the U.S., and at the risk of repeating a hackneyed aphorism, free speech is worthless unless it applies to offensive speech. It is an American value, and one well worth protecting.
If Alex has chosen you, then I want you to believe that I have chosen you as well.
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man as far as by it he does not hurt or control the right of another; and this is the only check it ought to suffer and the only bounds it ought to know.... Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freedom of speech, a thing terrible to traitors.
If someone offends you by speech, you must learn to defend yourself by speech.
I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but it's something you ought to do yourself.
Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'
What I ought to do and what I feel like doing are seldom the same thing.
Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.
Be true to what you want to say, or whatever style it is that you've chosen or genre you've chosen. Do it well! My criteria always has been that the piece must stand the chance of succeeding on the level it's intended to succeed on.
Much speech is one thing, well-timed speech is another.
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