authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you.

It takes courage to say what has to be said.

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

People with virtue must speak out; People who speak are not all virtuous.

The time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us today...

...some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.

Speak out, you got to speak out against
The madness, you got to speak your mind,
If you dare

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.

Does the sacred quest end with cultivating our own gardens and dwelling within our private and incommunicable experiences? Because we human beings are verbal and communal animals, we cannot remain wonder-struck and dumb. We need to say something. We are a species given to storytelling and philosophizing to explain our world. Ergo, it is pure folly to suppose we can avoid speaking about the ultimate context and meaning of our existence. We cannot simply be content with the private experience of elementary emotions and the great encompassing mystery. Our feelings demand expression. How are we to understand this perennial need to speak to G-d and about G-d even when what we say involves contradictions, paradoxes, and sacred nonsense? To communicate is to come back into the community. The hero must return from the inner journey to the common life of dialogue and engagement.

... anything difficult to say must be shouted from the rooftops.

"When we dare to speak in a liberatory voice, we threaten even those who may initially claim to want our words. In the act of overcoming our fear of speech, of being seen as threatening, in the process of learning to speak as subjects, we participate in the global struggle to end domination. When we end our silence, when we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence. Feminist focus on women finding a voice, on the silence of black women, of women of color, has led to increased interest in our words. This is an important historical moment. We are both speaking of our own volition, out of our commitment to justice, to revolutionary struggle to end domination, and simultaneously called to speak, "invited" to share our words. It is important that we speak. What we speak about is more important. It is our responsibility collectively and individually to distinguish between mere speaking that is about self-aggrandizement, exploitation of the exotic "other," and that coming to voice which is a gesture of resistance, an affirmation of struggle."

Speak your latent conviction. . . Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

This is happening in other parts of the world now. And you have to speak out. You can’t remain silent. Silence is complicity.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Stand upright, speak thy thoughts, declare The truth thou hast, that all may share; Be bold, proclaim it everywhere: They only live who dare.