In oratory the will must predominate.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

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

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

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

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

If you can’t hear me, it’s because I’m in parentheses.

Great is our admiration of the orator who speaks with fluency and discretion.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won’t last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don’t realise that.

Never give an order that can’t be obeyed.

Listening has importance only when one is not projecting one’s own desires through which one listens.

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 owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

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

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

I don’t have faith in young people any more. I don’t waste time trying to communicate with them.

Talk low, talk slow and don’t say too much.

You’ve got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you’ve got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

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

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

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.

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

There is one way to have a short but exciting conversation with me, and that is to move too slow.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

I just didn’t want to get out there anymore; I didn’t want to get back into what I call ‚the swamp.‘ And the other reason why is I don’t think it’s good for the presidency for a former president to be opining about his successor. President Obama’s got plenty of critics – and I’m just not gonna be one.

There was one incident at a movie theater where my girl got mad at these guys who were talking behind us. I never looked back there, but she was like, ‚Will you all just shut up!‘ And I just got up and moved three rows in front. She was like, ‚What are you doing?!‘ I was like, ‚You better get up here! I don’t play the fighting games.‘

I have been – I have spoken in Bir Zeit a number of times.

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.

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

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

It’s really fun to be on stage in front of people.

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.

Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards – the things we live by and teach our children – are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.

We can’t just choose to tell some facts and not others because we don’t want to upset people. We have to tell it like it is.

On TV the people can see it. On radio you’ve got to create it.

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

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

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.

What we all want is public safety. We don’t want rhetoric that’s framed through ideology.

When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I’m teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.

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.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

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

If you can talk, you can write.

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

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.

I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.

To be social is to be forgiving.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

I like to speak on matters which matter to human beings, and almost everything matters to human beings.

Music helps me tell my story. That’s where I can really be heard. But there’s so much focus on the things that aren’t music.

Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

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

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.