communication quotes

Never explain – your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.

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

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

I like learning more about people; I like to talk to people.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

I am an introvert; privately I am very shy, and I don’t speak unless I have to.

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.

Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency.

I haven’t gone out of my way to seek advice from people I don’t know.

To be social is to be forgiving.

I think we basically saw that the messaging space is bigger than we’d initially realized, and that the use cases that WhatsApp and Messenger have are more different than we had thought originally.

It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.

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

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

It is very hard to not be able to engage with people in a real and honest way because they either want something from me, or they see me as something that I simply am not.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

Diplomacy is listening to what the other guy needs. Preserving your own position, but listening to the other guy. You have to develop relationships with other people so when the tough times come, you can work together.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

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

The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

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

Talk well of the absent whenever you have the opportunity.

There are some people, you know, they think the way to be a big man is to shout and stomp and raise hell-and then nothing ever really happens. I’m not like that I never shoot blanks.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‚Did you sleep good?‘ I said ‚No, I made a few mistakes.‘

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

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

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.

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

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

I was also a junior and I know how you learn from seniors, that’s how you follow. Speeches don’t work.

If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

A speech idiosyncrasy, in the same way as an air quote, is really justifiable only if it’s employed very sparingly and if the user consciously intends to be using it.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, I’m home now. But leave a message and I’ll call when I’m out.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Before I speak, I have something important to say.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

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

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

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 reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

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

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

It’s tough to negotiate from a position of weakness.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Counsel with your parents is a privilege at any age.

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

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

You learn a lot about someone when you share a meal together.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.