We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

I don’t write letters anymore.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

I don’t like to talk much with people who always agree with me. It is amusing to coquette with an echo for a little while, but one soon tires of it.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Smiles are the language of love.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don’t believe is right.

When I look at public opinion, I’m not far out of the mainstream. I’m in it, in many respects. In some respects, public opinion goes beyond anything I’ve ever said.

The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That’s the day we truly grow up.

Speak low, if you speak love.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

I have always believed in evolving a consensus before taking any major decision.

How to drive a guy crazy: send him a telegram and on the top put ‚page 2.‘

My friend has a baby. I’m recording all the noises he makes so later I can ask him what he meant.

It’s rule number one, really – beating your teammate.

Democracy is our commitment. It is our great legacy, a legacy we simply cannot compromise. Democracy is in our DNA.

The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

To be social is to be forgiving.

No greater thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Tell them to send everything that can fly.

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

Nobody’s ever said that pins are a tool of diplomacy.

I learned from my dog long before I went to Gombe that we weren’t the only beings with personalities. What the chimps did was help me to persuade others.

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

Better understated than overstated. Let people be surprised that it was more than you promised and easier than you said.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

I hold a lot of things in. I’m always making sure everybody is okay. I usually don’t rage; I usually don’t curse. So for me, it’s a great thing to be able to scream and say whatever I want.

In the political system, we are a team; politics and bureaucracy, we are a team. The politicians, bureaucrats and the people, we are a team.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Charm is a way of getting the answer ‚Yes‘ without asking a clear question.

My game is really played above time. I don’t say that like I’m saying I’m ahead of my time. I’m saying, like, if I’m on the court and I throw a pass, the ball that I’ve thrown will lead my teammate right where he needs to go, before he even knows that that’s the right place to go to.

The only time people dislike gossip is when you gossip about them.

There’s different kinds of laughs. It’s like a baseball lineup: this guy’s your power hitter, this guy gets on base, this guy works out walks. If everybody does their job, we’re gonna win.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

Many people listen to what I have to say and I appear a lot in media, so therefore I influence a lot of people and therefore I have a bigger responsibility because I have a bigger platform.

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

Dividers seek to make themselves look or feel better by making others feel worse. They damage relationships, fracture teams and organizations, and create havoc in people’s lives.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.