Oral Quotes

There’s been resistance to every new technology that’s ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn’t stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

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.

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.

There is nothing terribly difficult in the Bible – at least in a technical way. The Bible is written in street language, common language. Most of it was oral and spoken to illiterate people. They were the first ones to receive it. So when we make everything academic, we lose something.

The blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.

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

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.

Twentieth century history of Christianity will name Oral Roberts as the voice that brought the Pentecostal movement to be taken seriously by mainline Christianity.

When I was in 4th grade, my mom was diagnosed with oral cancer. It was not looking good, it was serious when they found it. Obviously, I didn’t know much about what was going on. I remember feeling a lot of guilt about it, feeling like I somehow contributed to it. I think that’s just something that kids often do.

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There’s a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

Deep down I knew that if Hell existed, it was a real place full of ruthless, venal people, like the commodity pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, Disney World, or oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court.

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

There is no real agreement among scholars as to whether Homer and Hesiod were contemporaries or whether Homer came a hundred or so years later or earlier. How could there be, given that both poets recited and sang in an oral culture.

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me – to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That’s normally how I perform. That’s how I am.

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within ‘Roots‘ is from either my African or American families‘ carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.

The Courtroom is a battlefield, and oral argument requires a fair amount of verbal jousting and sparring with the Justices.

Abraham was extremely wealthy and he had a covenant with God. It’s not the Jewish blessing, it’s the Abrahamic blessing. I get excited talking about it ’cause I love it and I started out deep in debt with nothing. I had to learn this from the Bible and from my spiritual mentor Oral Roberts.

Justice Scalia was usually particularly challenging to me at oral argument, but I so respected his intellect and commitment to the pursuit of truth.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

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.

In third grade, I had to an oral report on the state of Oregon. I brought up Big Foot sightings, and I remember there was an argument about whether or not Big Foot was valid history. Ever since then I’ve been thinking about how subjective history is.

For the record, I believe that women and their doctors should have access to oral contraception when desired by the patient and medically appropriate.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

Everybody in my family were great storytellers. My dad and his brothers would just go on and on; they could tell amazing stories. I think it was something to do with the Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. People very much had that propensity towards telling tales.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It’s an oral history of black women’s lives through laughter.

Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root-canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon.

I had bad skin growing up and I swear by oral supplements.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories – I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

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

I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person… to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.

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

I grew up in a society with a very ancient and strong oral storytelling tradition. I was told stories, as a child, by my grandmother, and my father as well.

I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality – scientific or historical reality – in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That’s how I got interested in it.

There are fast chewers and slow chewers, long chewers and short chewers, right-chewing people and left-chewing people. Some of us chew straight up and down, and others chew side-to-side, like cows. Your oral processing habits are a physiological fingerprint.