In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Mind your speech a little lest you should mar your fortunes.

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.

After one has been in prison, it is the small things that one appreciates: being able to take a walk whenever one wants, going into a shop and buying a newspaper, speaking or choosing to remain silent. The simple act of being able to control one’s person.

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.

Swearing is industry language. For as long as we’re alive it’s not going to change. You’ve got to be boisterous to get results.

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

Silence is more eloquent than words.

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.

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.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

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

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

I know what I do for my team and what my teammates expect of me on both ends of the floor.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

I don’t want to just preach to the church. I feel like I have a broader message.

I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, this can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

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.‘

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

The best morale exist when you never hear the word mentioned. When you hear a lot of talk about it, it’s usually lousy.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

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.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

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

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn’t going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I’ve ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn’t want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

Often, little situations trigger enormous reactions. Be there, present for it. Your partner will find it easier to see it in you, and you will find it easier to see it in them.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

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

Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.

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.

When I’m nervous, I stutter, and I had to keep stopping and starting.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

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.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

I’ve always wanted male friends that I could be real intimate with and talk about important things with and be as affectionate with that person as I would be with a girl.

Tell the children the truth.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

I maintain that, if everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.

The word ‚Christianity‘ is already a misunderstanding – in reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

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.

When the players go home, I can’t tell them what to do, so you need to create an atmosphere of trust. I don’t want to think, ‚What are they doing now? Do I need to call them?‘

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.