Girls talk to each other like men talk to each other. But girls have an eye for detail.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don’t think the press has understood me.

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

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

My wife doesn’t even want to spend 2 hours with me.

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

Silence is more eloquent than words.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I’ll stop the whole production: ‚Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.‘

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

It’s hard for me to grasp the concept of somebody being nervous when I’m talking to them.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

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

If I’ve got a problem with one of my clients that needs to get solved, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to call them up, and I’m going to say, ‚Hey, here’s what’s going on. This is the situation. This thing went sideways. I didn’t expect it. Now it’s going to take me some more time to get you what you need.‘ But I’m going to do that upfront.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.

You can only have one aim per debate.

Speeches that are measured by the hour will die with the hour.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.

Clean fighting solves everything. It ends all bad blood and any ill feelings people have. That’s my thoughts.

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

To be social is to be forgiving.

I’m a people’s man – only the people matter.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

There’s a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite. And agreeable people get paid less than disagreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men.

Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it’s Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.

Speak low, if you speak love.

In order that all men may be taught to speak the truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.

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.

I wanted to be a doctor that I might be able to work without having to talk because for years I had been giving myself out in words.

The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

Of course you can’t ‚trust‘ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‚trust‘ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.