Quotes About Communication

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they're willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

MARIE    (Not sounding exactly cheerful) Mrs. Delaney, I'm expecting a telegram this morning. Would you leave it on my dresser for me when it comes? LOLA Sure, honey. No bad news, I hope. MARIE Oh, no! It's from Bruce. LOLA    (MARIE'S boy friends are one of her liveliest interests) Oh, your boy friend in Cincinnati. Is he coming to see you?

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who, under a certain religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compliments and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty.

14. Strive not with your superiors in argument, but always submit your judgment to others with modesty.

It matters because the emerging civic structures and spatial arrangements of the digital era will profoundly affect our access to economic opportunities and public services, the character and content of public discourse

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold.

No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse.

This is too busy a world for us to stop and wonder whether a man wants what he does not ask for. Too many are clamoring loudly for what we cannot give...

We broadcast from coast to coast every utterance of Hitler, but the German people are not permitted to know a word of what Roosevelt speaks.

KREBS: Today is the First of May, a great holiday for our two nations.† CHUIKOV: We have a great holiday today. How things are with you over there it is hard to say.

If tears of grief flowed from the eyes and tears of anger from the ears, I could show my heart without saying a word. But my tears all pour in the same way from my eyes, and there's no difference in their color. It's not surprising that you can't tell what's in my heart.

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.

We could take his gag away , thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.

Come on then," Deeba said. "We haven't got time to waste. You're not the ones who are going to get forgot in a few days' time if you don't phone home.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing.

If I program 'ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it," Scile said. "If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it's only sound, and that's not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.