Quotes About Dialogue

Morrie, as usual, had made his point: good conversational debate is an end to itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. p385

The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.

The shortest distance between two minds is a figure of speech.

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.

the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in "its collision with error.

Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

Sometimes thinking is like talking to another person, but that person is also you.

I don't want to hurt you, Mistress Weatherwax, said Mrs Gogol. That's good, said Granny. I don't want you to hurt me either.

That was great, al' that reading' ye did!' said Rob Anybody. 'I didnae understand a single word o' it!' 'Aye, it must be powerful language if you cannae make oout what the heel it's goin' on aboot!' said another pictsie.

Ach, noo yer talkin' oour language," said Rob Anybody. "Not…quite," said Tiffany.

Most of all, differences of opinion are opportunities for learning.

CONVERSATION is the vehicle for change.

Today, everyone thinks we need to stay positive and hopeful and not be completely honest about what we are seeing, what we know to be true. Whether we're talking about climate change or what's occurring on the streets in Ferguson, we are so afraid of offending people...and then, we only talk to our own constituencies and its' the same rhetoric over and over again until the words become bloodless. (p. 325)

A crisis woke us up. A shared love of place opened a dialogue with neighbors. We asked for help. We found partners. We used our collective intelligence to formulate a plan. And then we had to search within ourselves to find what each of us had to give.

Nadine did a lot of listening. It was the men who seemed to do all the talking.

For our dialogue to be open, we need to open our hearts, set aside our prejudices, listen deeply, and represent truthfully what we know and understand.

In a true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

For dialogue to be fruitful, we need to live deeply our own tradition and, at the same time, listen deeply to others. Through the practice of deep looking and deep listening, we become free, able to see the beauty and values in our own and others' tradition.

We have to believe that by engaging in dialogue with the other person, we have the possibility of making a change within ourselves, that we can become deeper.

Cum mulieribus non est disputandum, as Cicero says.

No me gustan los intelectuales hombres de las letras con sus conversaciones sobrecargadas de citas.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.