Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They’ll tell you.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner’s inquest.

What you guys want, I’m for.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

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

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

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.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence.

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

I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

It is not, of course, complete yet – but some sentences were understood this afternoon… I feel that I have at last struck the solution of a great problem – and the day is coming when telegraph wires will be laid onto houses just like water or gas – and friends converse with each other without leaving home.

A yawn is a silent shout.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.

I wish I could shut up, but I can’t, and I won’t.

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.

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

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

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

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

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.

I’m the most recognized and loved man that ever lived cuz there weren’t no satellites when Jesus and Moses were around, so people far away in the villages didn’t know about them.

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

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

You carry Mother Earth within you. She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer.

No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know.

At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn’t matter. You said, ‚That’s an American‘ because there’s a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights.

I don’t like talking to celebrities.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

I’m very sensitive. I remember, as a kid at school, if someone in the classroom was sad or angry, it could have a great impact on me.

The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.

I like it when someone tells me ‚I don’t agree.‘ This is a true collaborator. When they say ‚Oh, how great, how great, how great,‘ that’s not useful.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

I will listen to anyone’s convictions, but pray keep your doubts to yourself.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

To be clear: we have fights and problems like any other couple.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

Almost everybody will listen to you when you tell your own story.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‚Man, I said too much.‘ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.

A letter does not blush.

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‚Nice doggie‘ until you can find a rock.

As soon as I arrived in the Indies, in the first island which I found, I took some of the natives by force, in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts. And so it was that they soon understood us, and we them, either by speech or by signs, and they have been very serviceable.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I’m really good at email.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.