Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.

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.

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

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

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.

I have certain guys who I looked up to. Jordan, Kobe, those guys. Passing that on to doing my part to kind of keep that influence of basketball where it should be is kind of why I play the game.

All men hate the nagging.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

As scientists, we step on the shoulders of science, building on the work that has come before us – aiming to inspire a new generation of young scientists to continue once we are gone.

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.

We have come to a turning point in the road. If we turn to the right mayhap our children and our children’s children will go that way; but if we turn to the left, generations yet unborn will curse our names for having been unfaithful to God and to His Word.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

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

Speaking English is like tongue-twist for me. I can speak each word perfect, but then you have to string them together like, ‚Blah, blah, blah.‘ That’s when I get crazy.

Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.

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

You can only have one aim per debate.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

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.

One thing that I tell people all the time is, ‚I’m not going to answer a call from you after nine o’clock at night or before nine o’clock in the morning unless it’s an emergency.‘

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I’ll give you an example; I don’t read what’s handed to me. People say, ‚Here, here’s your speech, or here’s an idea for a speech.‘ They’re changed. Trust me.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

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.

I took the vow of celibacy in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of making the vow. She had no objection.

Understanding is a two-way street.

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

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

I didn’t just invent saying offensive things.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

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.

The drawing teacher has this problem of communicating how to draw by osmosis and not by instruction, while the physics teacher has the problem of always teaching techniques, rather than the spirit, of how to go about solving physical problems.

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.

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

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

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

I don’t understand why or how we can bully each other.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

There was a time Michael Jackson couldn’t get his video on MTV because he was considered to be ‚urban.‘ The Michael Jackson. So I literally have to be the Michael Jackson of apparel in order to break down the doors for everyone who will come after I’m gone, after I’m dead.

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Our most tragic error may have been our inability to establish a rapport and a confidence with the press and television with the communication media. I don’t think the press has understood me.

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

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

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.

Tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said.

When we turn to one another for counsel we reduce the number of our enemies.

I used to have nightmares that they would put ‚He played Ted‘ on my tombstone.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

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

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.