The Quotations Archive currently contains 1744 quotations.

Communication

Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer. Be what you say; and, within the rules of prudence, say what you are.

-- Alford

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.

-- Anonymous

The only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the tongue.

-- Anonymous

There's nothing wrong with having nothing to say -- unless you insist on saying it.

-- Anonymous

The best time to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.

-- Josh Billings

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man's observation, not overturning it.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.

-- Calvin Coolidge

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

-- Gandhi

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

-- Ernesto "Che" Guevara

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

-- Ernest Hemingway

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.

-- Kin Hubbard

Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of a great sculpture.

-- Aldous Huxley

Value your words. Each one may be the last.

-- Stanislaw J. Lec

I feel that if a person has problems communicating the very least he can do is to shut up.

-- Tom Lehrer

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

-- John Stuart Mill

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

-- John Stuart Mill

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

-- Mother Teresa

It was the greatest of the imperfect ventriloquist acts: when his lips moved, her body sang.

-- Tom Robbins

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

-- George Bernard Shaw

He had occasional flashes of silence that made his conversation perfectly delightful.

-- Sydney Smith, referring to Macaulay

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

-- James McNeill Whistler

Conversation, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will.

-- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway