Oral Quotes

In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether is it possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true.

I am quite unsatisfied by the distinctions between the oral and literate.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors that they are ready to repeat their lessons as often as we please.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

While most Americans have access to the best oral health care in the world, low-income children suffer disproportionately from oral disease.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

If on the one side we do not harbor the illusion that the entire proletariat must be enlightened before it can be called into battle, so on the other we do not doubt that as much enlightenment as possible must be produced with oral and printed agitation.

It is also one of the pleasures of oral biography, in that the reader, rather than editor, is jury.

I want to tell you a terrific story about oral contraception. I asked this girl to sleep with me and she said 'No.'

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

I don't need politicians doing a 24-hour prayer with Oral Roberts to get our country back on track.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

My opposition to Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember.

Recent demonstration projects have shown that with some Federal support, a little funding can go a long way toward ensuring that low-income children have access to good oral health care.

The Veteran's History Project, a nationwide volunteer effort to collect oral histories from America's war veterans, provides an avenue to do just that. Now in its fifth year, the Project has collected more than 40,000 individual stories.