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

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

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

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

No one would talk much in society if they knew how often they misunderstood others.

If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

I’m guarded; I don’t talk much.

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

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

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.

Me is a common sense man. That mean when me explain things, me explain it in a very simple way; that mean if I explain it to a baby, the baby will understand too, you know.

A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

Positional leaders ignore the fact that every person has hopes, dreams, desires, and goals of his own. And leaders must bring their vision and the aspirations of the people they lead together in a way that benefits everyone.

Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

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

For some reason, I have better luck when I work with women. I guess I have a good sense of sisterhood.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

A yawn is a silent shout.

At twenty years of age the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgment.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

A person hears only what they understand.

Dialogue means debates and everyone’s point of view.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

My first phone was two tin cans tied together with string, and it worked pretty good.

When we launched a new company, I reviewed the ads and marketing materials and asked those presenting the campaign to read everything aloud to test the phrasing and concept. If I could grasp it quickly, then it passed with muster. We would get our message across only if it was understandable at first glance.

Get someone else to blow your horn and the sound will carry twice as far.

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

These days, children can text on their cell phone all night long, and no one else is seeing that phone. You don’t know who is calling that child.

Building capacity dissolves differences. It irons out inequalities.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

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.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

In the course of a marriage, one accommodates the other.

Many people listen to what I have to say and I appear a lot in media, so therefore I influence a lot of people and therefore I have a bigger responsibility because I have a bigger platform.

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.

I there represent that I sent notice of my method to Mr. Leibnitz before he sent notice of his method to me, and left him to make it appear that he had found his method before the date of my letter.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

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

Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

And so I think that the idea of America working with other countries to solve problems is good for us, and it is part of digging us out of the ‚my way or the highway‘ approach that was evident in the previous eight years.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

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

Debates, I hate.

If you ever go to a music session, you’ll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they’re reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

Prayer is simply a two-way conversation between you and God.

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.

If you can’t move and talk to people that you see, it’s not really my scene.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

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.

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser.

A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don’t have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed.

I can honestly say, after talking about my mom passing away, I got the biggest weight off of my chest. Comedy is my therapy. That’s how I deal with my problems, my personal battles. I talk about it. I give it to my fans. When they laugh at it, it’s a release, for lack of a better word.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much.