Quotes About Communication

In the four years I had spent in Southeast Asia, I had changed, and so had the people back home. And I could not communicate effectively about these differences in perception.

I'm more than open to hope, but I think men and women have a difficult time dealing with each other and often take the low road.

In a relationship you have to open yourself up.

Relationships in general make people a bit nervous. It's about trust. Do I trust you enough to go there?

WRITER Right, but no offense, you guys eat dogs for lunch and many of us in the West here find that disgusting, so . . . ACTOR I'm not Korean, you prick! I'm of Chinese descent but I was born in Idaho! I-da-ho. You got that? / My God . . .

MAN No doubt about that—I can't even call 'em "girls" without getting hit by a lawsuit, so … (Grins.) You're a librarian? WOMAN Yeah. Well, we don't really use that term anymore, but, ahh … MAN Sure, of course! It's probably, like, "printed-word specialist" or something now, I suppose … WOMAN Exactly.

JEANNIE It's not like she's … She's really fat, Tom! A fat sow and you know it. I can tell you're aware by the way you're acting, which is really the puzzling part … TOM I-like-her. End of story.

WOMAN Really? Handsome guy like you and that's all you're good for … to look at? MAN Pretty much. WOMAN Good to know. (Opens a pudding.) You want one? MAN Nah, I shouldn't … WOMAN Why? MAN Excellent question. Okay.

TOM Come on! Seriously … HELEN Okay, okay … I'm … (Beat.) You have my hand there, you know. TOM Yeah, I … is that not …? HELEN It's fine. Just wanted to ask and see if it was an accident or not. TOM Umm … no. It wasn't, no. But … now you're making me self-conscious.

Perils of solitude #1: People talk to you. I'd rather listen.

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

Writing is defined as "a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.