Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is ‚elephant‘.

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

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.

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

There’s an ecstatic side to writing. It’s like jazz. It just has a life.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

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

A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.

Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.

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

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The difference between a stranger sending you a message that you might be interested in at a very low volume level, no repetition, just sending it to very few people, and that being done as spam – those things get close enough that you want to be careful never to filter out something that’s legitimate.

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.

Most negotiators are trying to get their way.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

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.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

Whatever words we utter should be chosen with care for people will hear them and be influenced by them for good or ill.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

Smiles are the language of love.

I don’t think people are going to talk in the future. They’re going to communicate through eye contact, body language, emojis, signs.

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

I write all of my own speeches.

I try to speak plainly so that my constituents who don’t follow the nuances of government like I do, because they’re too busy earning a real living, can understand the issues before me. None of this stuff is brain surgery.

Behold, at this hour our moral history is being preserved for eternity. Processes are at work which will perpetuate our every act and word and thought.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

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

I’m blessed to have such a tight-knit family that we can talk about anything. Whether we talk frequently or not, since we’re on separate ends of the country, there are a lot of moving parts, and we always stay tight and find that center ground that keeps us together.

Debates, I hate.

Extremely religious, legalistic people have a criticism or judgment about everyone and everything. They just have a way of bringing people down with what they say.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

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

When I looked at the third base coach, he turned his back on me.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

Possession isn’t nine-tenths of the law. It’s nine-tenths of the problem.

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

Among the letters my readers write me, there is a certain category which is continuously growing, and which I see as a symptom of the increasing intellectualization of the relationship between readers and literature.

When I am talking to people who I feel don’t like me or are mean, I get really shy, and I kind of curl up personality wise.

Being a good listener is absolutely critical to being a good leader; you have to listen to the people who are on the front line.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

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

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

It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

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.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood.

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

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

I’ll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it’s disappointing.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

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.

What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way. My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

We build too many walls and not enough bridges.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.