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

You’re never going to kill storytelling, because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.

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.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

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.

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.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

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.

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

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you, and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.

My own experience is use the tools that are out there. Use the digital world. But never lose sight of the need to reach out and talk to other people who don’t share your view. Listen to them and see if you can find a way to compromise.

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.

A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.

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.

Any fact that needs to be disclosed should be put out now or as quickly as possible, because otherwise the bleeding will not end.

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

I let the dog out, or I let him in, and we talk some. I let him know I like him, and he lets me know he likes me.

You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, ‚Why god? Why me?‘ and the thundering voice of God answered, ‚There’s just something about you that pisses me off.‘

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

Smiles are the language of love.

Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation. If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.

People talk to people who perceive nothing, who have open eyes and see nothing; they shall talk to them and receive no answer; they shall adore those who have ears and hear nothing; they shall burn lamps for those who do not see.

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

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

Don’t ever call a guy first. The thing they want the most is whatever they can’t have. It sounds really juvenile, but it works.

I make friends faster and easier than journalists.

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

I want to let you in on a little secret: I don’t always feel like I’m a success. That’s right. There are plenty of times when I feel like I’ve just totally messed up and failed to connect with the people I’m trying to communicate with.

War is what happens when language fails.

How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.

I meet people overseas that know five languages – that the only language I’m comfortable in is English.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

He who talks more is sooner exhausted.

In a certain way, it’s the sound of the words, the inflection and the way the song is sung and the way it fits the melody and the way the syllables are on the tongue that has as much of the meaning as the actual, literal words.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.

It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

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

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.

I have made the mistaken assumption – and I will attempt to be better at this – of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season. And that is my mistake.

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

I’m a great believer that any tool that enhances communication has profound effects in terms of how people can learn from each other, and how they can achieve the kind of freedoms that they’re interested in.

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.

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.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships.

Silence is safer than speech.

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

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

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

We’ve fallen into a trap of ever-widening orbits of contact, and there is a total disregard for the present moment.

Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.

I’m honest enough to say I don’t know everything. You know, I don’t. I don’t understand all of God. I don’t understand, you know, some kind of why bad things happen.

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.

In one case out of a hundred a point is excessively discussed because it is obscure; in the ninety-nine remaining it is obscure because it is excessively discussed.