Quotes About Conversation

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

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.

I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice-the voice of entertainment.

other forms of conversation will always remain. Speech, for example, and writing.

It is my object in the rest of this book to make the epistemology of television visible again. I will try to demonstrate by concrete example that television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice—the voice of entertainment

Los estadounidenses ya no hablan entre sí, sino que se entretienen recíprocamente. No intercambian ideas, sino imágenes.

To which we might add that every epistemology is the epistemology of a stage of media development. Truth, like time itself, is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

We attend to fragments of events from all over the world because we have multiple media whose forms are well suited to fragmented conversation.

In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).

After all, everyone's favorite subject is themselves.

I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.

It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.

Anna hung up none the wiser but feeling better for having talked with like-minded people.

Before she'd had to deal with it, complaints about the one- to two-second delay before words said on one end trickled into an ear on the other had struck Anna as frivolous. Not so. She was amazed at how seemingly small a thing could cripple conversation.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book's inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

The great secret of success is a controlled inner conversation from premises of fulfilled desire. The only price you pay for success is the giving up of your former conversation – which belongs to the Old Man, the unsuccessful man.

the Internet is merely 'the modern public square'

Even as the two admirals sat talking, the blockade was being joined by three new ships from England.

Yeah, I know, and he can't hit in any of them. Dave Harris, Senators' outfielder, when told that catcher Moe Berg spoke seven languages.