Quotes About Communication

listen to what other people called silence

Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage.

She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back.

If you ask a person, "What were you thinking?" you may get an answer that is richer and more revealing of the human condition than any stream of thoughts a novelist could invent.

The best way to do the job, Polanyi argued, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing.

Von Neumann at six joked with his father in classical Greek and had a truly photographic memory: he could recite entire chapters of books he had read.392 Edward Teller, like Einstein before him, was exceptionally late in learning—or choosing—to talk.393 His grandfather warned his parents that he might be retarded, but when Teller finally spoke, at three, he spoke in complete sentences.

Later that day Frisch looked me up and said, "You work in a microbiology lab. What do you call the process in which one bacterium divides into two?" And I answered, "binary fission." He wanted to know if you could call it "fission" alone, and I said you could.

It is agreed between us First, that we will never use this agency against each other. Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent. Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.

Within three years, a Russian diplomat in Saint Petersburg who was an amateur experimenter, Baron Pavel L'vovitch Schilling, had begun designing a telegraph system based on Oersted's discoveries. Schilling demonstrated the system to Czar Alexander I sometime before the Czar's death in 1825.

In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

He chose not to work through the limited official channels that the Army and the OSRD had devised to constrict the flow of information. "I wanted to let Oppenheimer know what we were doing. Someone in the Bureau of Ships knew one of the people in the [Navy] Bureau of Ordnance who was going out to Los Alamos. I remember that I met the man at the old Warner Theater here in Washington, up in the balcony—real cloak and dagger stuff.

Early English roads were terrible. The Crown required landholders to maintain local roads at their own expense, one of three ancient obligations—to keep roads and bridges in repair, to build and maintain fortifications, and to serve in the militia—exacted to facilitate the kingdom's defense.30 Roads for ordinary communication and commerce were effectively orphans.

Men like to recall, in later years, what they said at some important or possibly historic moment in their lives. . . . I remember only too well what I said to General Somervell that day. I said, "Oh." As

My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.

The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...

This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.

If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.

The conversation advanced with remarkable ease. Talk is cheerful, the way talk is among people who rarely see one another and are surprised they have much to say.

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we'll talk God into it. We think, "If I say it one more time, God will agree with me." That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it "right" or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong! 19 minutes ago

It's not the idea that we hear, as much as the positive or negative energy behind it.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.