Quotes About Communication

Whoever said men hit harder when women are around, is right. Word for word, we beat the love out of each other.

Nobody is ever misunderstood at a fireside; he may only be disagreed with.

Only friendship which can stand occasional plain speaking is worth having.

For every good book is worth the reader's while when there is a real communion of the spirit, and this is possible only when he feels he is being taken into the author's confidence and the author is willing to reveal to him the innermost searchings of his heart and talk, as it were, in an unbuttoned mood, collar and tie loose, as by a friend's fireside.

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.

Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.

Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honour. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers' smell unbearable.)

Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching "the four Cs"—critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.3 More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.

Since humans are individuals, it is difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date.

Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety, hatred, joy, and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus.

the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.

This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Politicians are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the human emotional and biochemical system. They give a speech, and there is a wave of fear in the country. They tweet, and there is an explosion of hatred.

We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.

The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple.

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution