Communication Quotes

A lively discussion is usually helpful, because the hottest fire makes the hardest steel.

~ Tom Clancy

Though the man-apes often fought and wrestled one another, their disputes very seldom resulted in serious injuries. Having no claws or fighting canine teeth, and being well protected by hair, they could not inflict much harm on one another. In any event, they had little surplus energy for such unproductive behavior; snarling and threatening was a much more efficient way of asserting their points of view.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

~ Clay Shirky

It’s so hard to communicate because there are so many moving parts. There’s presentation and there’s interpretationand they’re so dependent on each other it makes things very difficult.

~ Garth Stein

I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.

~ Lydia Davis

She didn't say anything—at least, not with her mouth. Her eyes told me a different story. The only problem was that they each had a thousand tongues talking, each in a language I didn't speak.

~ J.x. Burros

Words travel as swiftly as desire, so it is possible to send a message of love without them.

~ Laura Esquivel

Man's first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.

~ Barnett Newman

Human communication, 'as the saying goes, is a clash of symbols' it covers a multitude of signs. But it is more than media and messages, information and persuasion; it also meets a deeper need and serves a higher purpose. Whether clear or garbled, tumultuous or silent, deliberate or fatally inadvertent, communication is the ground of meeting and the foundation of community. It is, in short, the essential human connection.

~ Ashley Montagu

We may well find that if we are to fulfill God's mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality.

~ Tim Challies

Geez, what do I need to do, use semaphore? I told you I was unclaimed.

~ Katie Macalister

Phones with numerical keypads worked best for dialing phone calls. Incidentally, phone calls tend to be the primary function of a phone. 'Smartphones' completely ignore these basic facts, resulting in some of the least intelligent devices I've seen yet. Oh the irony.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

We have developed communications systems to permit man on earth to talk with man on the moon. Yet mother often cannot talk with daughter, father to son, black to white, labour with management or democracy with communism

~ Hadley Read

Here's one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: it's damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about. Look, the sheer fact that people have banged out book after article after dramatic interpretation of this guy should tell you that despite his eloquence, he wasn't the clearest of communicators.

~ Eleanor Brown

He opened the first letter, No Dear Mr. Woods. It was a page full of profanities. There was something oddly refreshing about honest, to-the-point hate mail. No hypocrisy and forced politeness. Too many letters ripped you to shreds, then closed off 'Sincerely yours.

~ Randy Alcorn

I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.

~ Octavia E. Butler

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

~ Joseph O'connor

Open scatter is more fundamental than coupled sharing; it is the stuff from which, on splendid occasions, dialogue may arise.

~ John Durham Peters

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

~ Clay Shirky

As human beings, how do we choose to react in that instant when someone walks toward us, smiles, and begins to speak?

~ Jeff Deck

Shulman argues that work that is valued is work that is presented to colleagues. The failure to make this kind of wider connection weakens the sense of community. This happens in scholarly life when such essential functions as professional service or teaching do not get discussed openly or often enough.

~ Charles E. Glassick

The more you engage and connect, the more engagements and connections you will have.

~ Loren Weisman

Communication creates collaboration. Big ears are better than big egos. When you’re not listening, ask good questions.

~ Bill Walsh

We have the best chance of communicating our thoughts if we are sincere and speak from the heart, without hidden intent.

~ Wu Wei

When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.

~ Ted Chiang

Just as we use speech and gestures to communicate, so we use touch. Words can say, ‘I love you’, but touch can also say how and how much, and, at the same time, ‘I respect you’, ‘I need you’, and ‘thank you’. For a long time, scientists somehow thought that touch served merely to emphasize a verbal message. But now it is clear even to them that touch can be the message, and that it can be more nuanced and sophisticated than either speech or gestures, and more economical to boot. What’s more, touch is a two-way street; and a person’s reaction to our touch can tell us much more than their words ever could. Finally, while words can lie, or be taken for granted, primal touch is difficult to either ignore or discount.

~ Neel Burton

No works just fine as a complete sentence. You don't have to explain yourself.I said no, then stopped talking.

~ Scott Stabile

Assuming less does not make you naive, it makes you a better listener.

~ Terry A O'neal

There is no one-size-fits-all in communication—everyone’s interpretation of what what you say and how you say it is different.

~ Terry A O'neal

I've been watching you ever since you came into town, and you never gave a single sign that you were interested in her. That's why I made a move. If I couldn't tell, neither can she.I'm very bad at co

~ Dan Wells

Connecting to the outernet was less of a shock this time, as the monitor gave him a sense of distance from it, but it was still annoying. How did these people live with such a system, stalked by advertisements and free offers and icons that would take you to another site, unasked-for, the moment you gave them your attention? It was like wending your way through an obstacle course. Perhaps after a while you just learned to tune it all out... or perhaps you could buy programs that did it for you. He would have to design himself one of those before he did any more real work on the outernet, though he suspected that the consumer programs which were stalking him were capable of adapting to anything he could turn out quickly.Advertising: the ultimate predator. He longed for the simplicity of the Gueran network, which simply did what it was supposed to and no more. When had these people lost touch with the fact that the purpose of a network was to facilitate communication, not impede it?

~ C.s. Friedman

I am alone, but never lonely. I am lonely, but never alone.

~ Benjamin Aubrey Myers

I always feel myself being thrust back into loneliness when someone tells me it's cold on a hot day. It isn't good to talk so much about the weather — weather is a highly personal matter, and communication on the subject inevitably fails.

~ Yōko Tawada

Language communicates in terms of what is already know, it chokes up when asked to deal with entirely unprecedented.

~ Vivek Shanbhag

Every new form of communication brings with it a perennial angst about what it is doing to our brains. We are not the first to feel that everything is changing too quickly around us, and we won't be the last. Throughout history, communication technologies have been catalysts of societal and cultural change that upset the status quo.

~ Alfred Hermida

The messages must be stuck somewhere in the tube of light underneath the ocean that connects London and New York.

~ Olivia Sudjic

Our ability to connect with others is innate, wired into our nervous systems, and we need connection as much as we need physical nourishment.

~ Sharon Salzberg

It's not how well you communicate, but how intensely you have blended emotions with words that provides hints and triggers audiences mind to decipher and respond without your influence is what matters!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Communication happens on the periphery between two minds while communion melts two beings into one! What are YOU?

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

I rarely interacted much with anyone back then who wasn't retarded. When I did, it struck me how pompous and impatient they were, always measuring their words, twisting things around. Everybody was so obsessed with being understood. It made me sick.

~ Ottessa Moshfegh