If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

Speak low, if you speak love.

Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

What makes you a SEAL, what makes you a SEAL is being a good tactician on the battle field, understanding how to shoot, move, and communicate, knowing small unit maneuver warfare. That’s what makes a good SEAL, and so that is the course of instruction that I taught, was getting SEAL platoons ready for deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t write letters anymore.

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.

I think one of the basic reasons men make good friends is that they can make up their minds quickly.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Silence is safer than speech.

I’m going to save my public voice largely for the issues where I have some depth.

Silence is a true friend who never betrays.

Of course, like anybody I repeat myself endlessly, but I don’t know that I’m doing it, usually.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

If you’re a politician, you might want to learn the Buddhist way of negotiation. Restoring communication and bringing back reconciliation is clear and concrete in Buddhism.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Write in such a way as that you can be readily understood by both the young and the old, by men as well as women, even by children.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Compassionate listening is to help the other side suffer less. If we realize that other people are the same people as we are, we are no longer angry at them.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

Friendship, like credit, is highest when it is not used.

Wars are, of course, as a rule to be avoided; but they are far better than certain kinds of peace.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat.

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

The American public’s a lot more sophisticated than we all give them credit for. And on complicated issues, I’m going to give them straight answers. And if it takes more than three minutes, I’m going to do it.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

Prayer is such a basic foundation of a Christian’s relationship with God. It’s how we communicate and fellowship with Him. But a surprising number of people, young and old, new and even long-time Christians, say they’re not satisfied with their prayer life.

Let us move from the era of confrontation to the era of negotiation.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

When he speaks to you he speaks with an earnest vibe and an earnest energy.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

Friendship is essentially a partnership.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

Consider, when you are enraged at any one, what you would probably think if he should die during the dispute.

If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone for whom you have absolutely no respect.

I think, a lot of times when you meet someone, you feel like you need to appear like you’re not interested in them so that they’ll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What’s he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don’t want to sign up for that.

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

It pays to know the enemy – not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

The common thread for everything I do is this idea of a Web-services architecture. What does that mean? It means taking components of software and systems and having them be self-describing, so that you can aim them, ask them what their capabilities are, and communicate with them using a standard protocol.

Whoever the coach is, my job is to talk to him, understand him and be a better player under him and give my best.

You always have to remember that if you say something negative, it’s going to come back to haunt you.