Winfried Herrmann, a Greens legislator and a pacifist, called it "an astoundingly modest speech" and added, with faint praise: "I expected that he would say something that would force me to leave the hall.
Two weeks ago, with the investigation of his art purchases accelerating, Mr. Kozlowski offered a more modest speech to the graduates of St . Anselms College in Manchester, N.H. "As you go forward in life, you will become leaders of families, communities, and even companies," Mr. Kozlowski said in the text of his May 18 commencement address.
Such endearingly modest speeches don't bode well for having the Shortlist show find a prime-time slot on network television anytime soon.
He followed his charmingly modest acceptance speech with the briefest of encores – In Memory of a Pure Soul: Klara Schiff in Memoriam, the piece for right hand alone that his teacher György Kurtág composed as a tribute to his mother.
Sun Yang, the 1,500m freestyle swimming world-record holder, has given a modest and downbeat speech to China's national swimming team.
There was the captain, Billy Wright, who delivered a modest but confident speech about trying to bring the cup home, and available to him some of the greatest players in English history - Stan Mortensen, Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney among them.
"The superior man is modest in his speech, exceeds in his actions and always travels to the right".
DeMoss writes: "Great leaders are first of all great servants--and great service is modest, understated, in speech and action.
The paper's leader column was less enthusiastic, calling the speech a "modest success" but saying Miliband's "embryonic one-nation Labourism" overlapped with David Cameron's "brand of one-nation Conservatism", leaving Miliband with "little that could be identified as a distinctive policy platform on which to take Labour into a general election".
While the real Stephen Colbert was gracious and modest in his acceptance speech at the Nokia Theatre, Stephen Colbert the character seized the opportunity to gloat in his first night back on the air Tuesday.
It sparked student protests with modest demands: greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms, curbs on corruption.
