If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

For some reason, I’m really comfortable talking about my personal life in songs.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

I’m not always going to say things the perfect way, the right way. But I’m going to say how I feel.

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

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.

The image is one thing and the human being is another. It’s very hard to live up to an image, put it that way.

Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying.

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.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

I’ve never been shy or secretive with the fact that if you walk into my life, you may be walking onto a record.

What really raises one’s indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

A woman will doubt everything you say except it be compliments to herself.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

I feel like the reason people feel like they know me is because I’m giving you myself in the music. There’s where the connection comes from; you can’t Twitter that.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

When you have enough understanding and compassion in you, then that amount of understanding and compassion will try to express itself in action. And your practice should help you to cultivate more understanding and compassion.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man. I had to show the world.

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to trust your team. It’s a lesson I’ve had to relearn quite a few times.

Trying to read our DNA is like trying to understand software code – with only 90% of the code riddled with errors. It’s very difficult in that case to understand and predict what that software code is going to do.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

When I was two, a dragonfly flew near me. A man knocked it to the ground and trod on it. I remember crying because I’d caused the dragonfly to be killed.

Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.

I have always been that girl in the back who doesn’t say anything.

You hear about actors being late and all that sort of stuff, but you never find that with an actor who’s directed, because an actor who’s directed understands all the problems your production is going through.

Information helps you to see that you’re not alone. That there’s somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who’ve all longed and lost, who’ve all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you’re not really any different from everyone else.

Man can be understood only by ascending from physics, chemistry, biology, and geology. In other words, he is first of all a cosmic problem.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

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.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

I don’t see myself in terms of artifice. I see myself as a real person who chooses to live my life in an open way – artistically.

To understand a name you must be acquainted with the particular of which it is a name.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.

There is no greater index of character so sure as the voice.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

The little man is still a man.

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

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.

It never mattered to me that people in school didn’t think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it – though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, ‚I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots.‘

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

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

In retrospect, I do think it’s fair to say that we were overly idealistic and focused on more of the good parts of what connecting people and giving people a voice can bring.

I did my utmost to ensure that everyone below me in the chain of command felt comfortable approaching me with concerns, ideas, thoughts, and even disagreements.

We all want to be famous people, and the moment we want to be something we are no longer free.

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.