communication quotes

Adrienne Rich: 

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Alvin Toffler: 

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

Ambrose Bierce: 

Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. 
The Devil's Dictionary 


Anne Morrow Lindbergh: 

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Clarence Darrow: 

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

Edward R. Murrow: 

People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

Edward R. Murrow: 

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

Edwin H. Friedman: 

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

Ernest Hemingway: 

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: 

Be sincere; be brief; be seated.

George Bernard Shaw: 

The problem with communication ... is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

George Eliot: 

[I]t is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Hildegard Goos-Mayr: 

Generally speaking, the first nonviolent act is not fasting, but dialogue. The other side, the adversary, is recognized as a person, he is taken out of his anonymity and exists in his own right, for what he really is, a person. To engage someone in dialogue is to recognize him, have faith in him. At every step in the nonviolent struggle, at every level we try tirelessly to establish a dialogue, or reestablish it if it has broken down. When I say 'the other side,' that could be a group of persons or a government.

Hubert H. Humphrey: 

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

John Dewey: 

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.

Jonathan Swift: 

Argument is the worst sort of conversation.

Joseph Priestley: 

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

Kin Hubbard: 

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.

Marcel Proust: 

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.

Margaret Chase Smith: 

One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.

Marie Ebner von Eschenbach: 

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

Michel de Montaigne: 

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

Pearl S. Buck: 

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

Rachel Naomi Remen: 

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Robert Greeleaf: 

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

Robert Greenleaf: 

Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much.

Rollo May: 

Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.

Rudyard Kipling: 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Sharon Schuster: 

When we have the courage to speak out – to break our silence – we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views.

Virginia Satir: 

Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual differences are appreciated, mistakes are tolerated, communication is open, and rules are flexible -- the kind of atmosphere that is found in a nurturing family.

Willa Cather: 

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Woodrow Wilson: 

If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.