I there represent that I sent notice of my method to Mr. Leibnitz before he sent notice of his method to me, and left him to make it appear that he had found his method before the date of my letter.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

People are generally amazed that I would take an interest in any forum that would require me to stop talking for three hours.

The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film – whether it’s history, psychology, economics, or architecture – so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn’t going to help you unless you have something to say.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Talking isn’t doing. It is a kind of good deed to say well; and yet words are not deeds.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

If you don’t like what someone has to say, argue with them.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

If you’re really satisfied with your position on something, you just say, ‚Hey;‘ you just very calmly present something.

If I have the chance to say something, I will say it – but that doesn’t obligate me to always say something, or to shed light on every problem, as if I were a lawmaker.

Facebook and Instagram are both really popular with teens, both in the U.S. and globally across the world. I think what you’re starting to see is that there are all these different ways that people want to share and communicate.

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

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Here in the West, people often don’t like listening to their leaders, even if they are right.

I write all my sermons.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

If you’re yelling you’re the one who’s lost control of the conversation.

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.

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

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

I always keep my guard up with guys and I guess that can get in the way sometimes. I can make them go through hell.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

I don’t think people are going to talk in the future. They’re going to communicate through eye contact, body language, emojis, signs.

I like it when someone tells me ‚I don’t agree.‘ This is a true collaborator. When they say ‚Oh, how great, how great, how great,‘ that’s not useful.

Parents and teachers, learn to listen, then listen to learn from children.

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

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

What you guys want, I’m for.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

When you have good friends you’ve been around, every time they talk, you don’t give them your full attention. You don’t look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you’re listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

In England, an inventor is regarded almost as a crazy man, and in too many instances, invention ends in disappointment and poverty. In America, an inventor is honoured, help is forthcoming, and the exercise of ingenuity, the application of science to the work of man, is there the shortest road to wealth.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

One of my direct subordinates, one of my guys that worked for me, he would call me up or pull me aside with some major problem, some issue that was going on. And he’d say, ‚Boss, we’ve got this, and that, and the other thing.‘ And I’d look at him and I’d say, ‚Good.‘

In the last analysis, what we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Journalism largely consists of saying ‚Lord Jones is Dead‘ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

If I have something to say, I want it to be meaningful.

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

To me, it’s OK to have differences. But we don’t have to be mad about it. You know? And I think that’s where sometimes we get so passionate that we – you know, it turns into anger.

Silence is safer than speech.

What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

Normally, when someone we love is turning away from a struggle, we self-protect by also turning away. That’s definitely my first response. I think change is more likely to happen if both partners have common language and a shared lens to see problems.

If you go back a few hundred years, what we take for granted today would seem like magic – being able to talk to people over long distances, to transmit images, flying, accessing vast amounts of data like an oracle. These are all things that would have been considered magic a few hundred years ago.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.