Quotes About Communication

This is the propagandist's opportunity," Lippmann wrote.156 With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.

TO WRITE SOMETHING down doesn't make it true. But the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail.

A ROBOT COMPUTER WILL GIVE CBS THE FASTEST REPORTING IN HISTORY," read the headline.31 The UNIVAC would stay in Philadelphia—it was too big to move—but in New York, CBS would install a fake, a console lit, from the inside, by a string of Christmas lights. The first computer most Americans ever saw was an empty shell: a stunt.

Can literacy destroy?

As soon as the curious Pequots came within range, the interpreter "pulls up his cock and let fly at one of them, and without question was the death of him."32 When

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

Most Americans had only ever heard national political candidates shouting, trying to project their voices across a banquet hall or a football field. Hearing Roosevelt speak quietly and calmly, as if he were sitting across the kitchen table, having a reasonable argument with you, earned him Americans' dedicated affection. "It was a God-given gift," his wife said. He "could talk to people so that they felt he was talking to them individually.

This not flirting and just-being-friends business was going to be bloody hard.

But even as the words were coming out of his mouth, he was slightly despising himself for saying them. It was what girls liked to hear though. Every now and again Dex found himself feeling like an actor who'd been performing in the same stage play for far too long. The lines came out automatically, irrespective of whether or not they were true.

The spiders, honeybees, yellow jackets, and mud daubers: these insects still speak - a language that is older than humans. The buffalo, elk, wolf, coyote -they still talk too. It's we, the people, who have forgotten how to listen. [Osage Spider Story, an Osage Legend, told by Archie Mason, Jr]

Metaphor is the literal language of the soul. Poets do not try "to think up metaphors." They are not interested in making up riddles for the rest of us to figure out. They think in metaphors.

If you tell someone a secret, and ask them to keep it secret, you are asking them to display a discretion you are unable to display yourself.

It's frustrating when you know all the answers, but nobody bothers to ask you the questions.

But at a moment when I needed such interaction

sometimes it is necessary for us all to pretend together that language can really mean.

Everyone now, not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis. Artifice abounds.

Lord Sedgecroft--" "Ssh. It isn't polite to interrupt me when I'm kissing you.

And the truth is, sometimes my sisters and I do get jealous, and sometimes we do say things to-and about-one another that are thoughtless and rude. We don't meant them, though. It's just whenever we're together, we slip into our old familiar roles.

And although it may seem that governments and citizens (in the form of NGOs or civil society organizations) are given somewhat equal access, the truth is that no citizen, not even a director of a powerful NGO, can simply pick up the phone and dial Mark Zuckerberg to complain about a policy decision the way that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has been known to do.62

brother." "Oh," he replied, seating

I have a theory that the secret of marital happiness is simple: drink in different pubs to your other half.

He thought of Hilary's tantrums, of her vacuum-cleaner kisses, her sharp teeth and scraping hands.

Father-in-law comes to stay, goes to local church and returns saying he will spend the rest of his life translating New English Bible back into English.

I adore watching other people in restaurants, beautiful people toying with steak tartare, hoping to be recognized, married couples eating but not talking, lovers eating each other, illicit couples ducking nevously behind the celery and the gristicks every time the door opens, children doing more whining than dining, storing food in the corners of their cheeks like cherubs at the corner of old maps, then suddenly spraying spinach all over the snow-white tablecloth.