Quotes About Communication

Churchill's great trick—one he had demonstrated before, and would demonstrate again—was his ability to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.

As it happened, their father had not had to spend very much time worrying. He had received telegrams from both sons, telling him each was looking for the other. The telegrams, Leslie later learned, had arrived five minutes apart, "so that father knew at home that we were both safe before we did.

She loved "their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.

I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

to remain silent is out of the question for a strong and honest man.

Dodd read dispatch after dispatch in which Messersmith described Germany's rapid descent from democratic republic to brutal dictatorship. Messersmith spared no detail—his tendency to write long had early on saddled him with the nickname "Forty-Page George.

He joined the crew of the Lake Champlain, a small steam-powered cargo ship owned by the Beaver Line of Canada but subsequently acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway. He was its second officer in May 1901, when it became the first merchant vessel to be equipped with wireless.

He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

He wrote: "Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational." The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

From the start, Churchill and Fisher resolved to keep the operation so secret that only they and a few other Admiralty officials would ever know it existed.

He died angry," Chalmers said, "because I didn't believe him. Even in death he is emphatic and imperious.

The resulting prose, he wrote, "may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.

aerodrome" but, rather, "airfield"; not "aeroplane" but "aircraft." Churchill was particularly insistent that ministers compose memoranda with brevity and limit their length to one page or less. "It is slothful not to compress your thoughts," he said. Such precise and demanding communication installed at all levels a new sense of responsibility for events, and dispelled the fustiness of routine ministerial work.

It is slothful not to compress your thoughts

scarify, a six-hundred-year-old word that only Churchill would use in crucial diplomatic correspondence—" would scarify their names for a thousand years of history.

In this time when writing long letters was everyday practice, men of normal sensibility saw these cards as the most crabbed of media, little better than telegrams

All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars, and a double bed," he said. Or this: "One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.

There are some things I must try to say before the still watches come again in which the things unsaid hurt so and cry out in the heart to be uttered.

Not only this, but through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face." That word: television. In 1900.

Deploying flattery leavened with irony, he began:

One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon.

the queen a copy of Henry Watson Fowler's famous 1926 guide to the English language, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

than four months. She and Churchill kept separate bedrooms; sex happened only upon her explicit invitation. It was to Bonham Carter that Clementine, soon after being wed, revealed Churchill's peculiar taste in underclothes: pale pink and made of silk.

One of the secrets of a happy marriage is never to speak to or see the loved one before noon." Churchill had a formula for family size as well. Four children was the ideal number: "One to reproduce your wife, one to reproduce yourself, one for the increase in population, and one in case of accident.