"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
— Judy Blume

"People fail to get along because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they have not communicated with each other."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."
— C.S. Lewis

"I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings." -from the Fox-"
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after. "
— Anna Morrow Lindbergh

"If someone were to ask whether communications skills or meekness is most important to a marriage, I'd answer meekness, hands down. You can be a superb communicator but still never have the humility to ask, 'Is it I?' Communication skills are no substitute for Christlike attributes. As Dr. Douglas Brinley has observed, 'Without theological perspectives, secular exercises designed to improve our relationship and our communication skills (the common tools of counselors and marriage books) will never work any permanent change in one's heart: they simply develop more clever and skilled fighters!'"
— John Bytheway (When Times Are Tough: 5 Scriptures That Will Help You Get Through Almost Anything)

"Having not said anything the first time, it was somehow even more difficult to broach the subject the second time around."
— Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish)

"Self-consciousness kills communication."
— Rick Steves

"Stephen Covey, in his book The 8th Habit, decribes a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a number of companies and industries. He reports the poll's findings:

* Only 37 percent said they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why
* Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team's and their organization's goals
* Only one in five said they had a clear "line of sight" between their tasks and their team's and organization's goals
* Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals
* Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they work for



Then, Covey superimposes a very human metaphor over the statistics. He says, "If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.""
— Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)

"To speak little is natural. Therefore a gale does not blow a whole morning nor does a downpour last a whole day."
— Laozi

"We are stronger when we listen, and smarter when we share."
— Rania of Jordan

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart."
— Nelson Mandela

"[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on."
"
— David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays)

"When we change the way we communicate, we change society
"
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of."
— Alex Shakar (The Savage Girl)

"Want to play hangman? asks Theophile, and I ache to tell him that I have enough on my plate playing quadriplegic. But my communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter. So the rule is to avoid impulsive sallies. It deprives conversation of its sparkle, all those gems you bat back and forth like a ball-and I count this forced lack of humor one of the great drawbacks of my condition."
— Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

"Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue."
— Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband)

"To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?"
Source: Made To Stick, p.88"
— Chip Heath

"Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
"
— Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)

"Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about."
— Cory Doctorow

"Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"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 (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"He watched their faces, and he knew each meant desperately what she said because they loved each other, and deep inside surely each knew the words were false, that the true words were those unspoken."
— Margaret Craven (I Heard the Owl Call My Name:)

"We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different (p. 364)."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"Das Internet ist das erste Medium, das diese Grenze [zwischen Publikation und Kommunikation] aufhebt."
— Thomas Knüwer

"No one can tell, when two people walk closely together, what unconscious communication one mind may have with another"
— Robert Barr (Selected Stories of Robert Barr)

"Worte entfremden. Sprache ist kein Medium für Begehren. Begehren ist Hingerissensein, nicht Austausch. Nur dadurch, dass die Sprache das Begehrte entfremdet, beherrscht sie es."
— J.M. Coetzee (In the Heart of the Country)

"Jeder ist immer erreichbar. Die ganze Welt beschleunigt sich, alles ist dringend, und wo alles dringend ist, ist nichts mehr dringend, und damit schlittern wir in eine Bedeutungslosigkeit hinein."
— Joseph Weizenbaum

"The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it."
— Edward R. Murrow

"'I'm Valerie Rye,' she said, savoring the words. 'It's all right for you to talk to me.'"
— Octavia E. Butler (Bloodchild and Other Stories: Second Edition)

"Try saying this: 'What's true for me today is that I have angry feelings concerning what I heard you say when you said what you said. It reminds me of what my mother said when she said what she said, and that hurts me so that's where I'm at with this, and it's not all right with me for today.' This should help to avoid a lot of communication problems."
— Judith Stone (Heeling Your Inner Dog:: A Self-Whelp Book)

"If I already intuitively "get" what you're trying to tell me, why should I obsess about remembering it? The danger, of course, is that what sounds like common sense often isn't.... It's your job, as a communicator, to expose the parts of your message that are uncommon sense.
Source: Made To Stick, p.72"
— Chip Heath

"Forget language. Afer all, it bores me. The senses. And this much is true: any communication must transcend the immediacy of solidarity, must be mediated by ideological and economic connections. And there the senses reappear. No use giving in to words."
— V Y Mudimbe

"Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Nul ne peut voir par-dessus soi, écrit Schopenhauer pour faire comprendre l'impossibilité d'un échange d'idées entre deux individus d'un niveau intellectuel trop différent."
— Michel Houellebecq (The Possibility of an Island)

"The revolution in global communications thus forces all nations to reconsider traditional ways of thinking about national sovereignty."
— George Shultz

"Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity."
— Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations)

"People have important things to communicate. Speaking from your heart allows the emotionally difficult, the ordinary, and the wonderful things in our lives to be communicated and received."
— David McArthur and Bruce McArthur,

"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are som many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on."
— David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays)

"When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.
"
— David Foster Wallace