“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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Susanna Clarke 29
British author 1959Related quotes
Derrida Jacques, Elisabeth Weber (1995), Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994. p. 115
Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, P.107
Source: Die Mathematik die Fackelträgerin einer neuen Zeit (Stuttgart, 1889), p. 5.
Stated at a press conference (April 4, 1935); reported in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948), p. 60. Sherwood says, "The reports of this conference quoted Hopkins as saying that 'the people are too damned dumb', and this phrase was given plenty of circulation in the press" (p. 61). He adds in a footnote that "it will be seen from the transcript of his remarks that this particular statement was directed not at the people but at the critical orators" (p. 938). Also reported in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 48-49; Boller and George also note that the quote was quickly misreported as "The people are too damn dumb to understand".
“If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.”
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
This has been compared to Horace Walpole's statement: "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel."
Variant translation: Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce.
Source: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
“I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little.”
The Other World (1657)
Context: I learned to understand their language and to speak it a little. Immediately the news spread throughout the kingdom that two little wild men had been discovered. We were smaller than everybody else because the wilderness had provided us with such bad food. And it was a genetic defect that caused us to have forelimbs that weren't strong enough to support us.
This belief gained strength through repetition despite the priests of the country. They opposed it, saying that it was an awful impiety to believe that not only animals but monsters might be of the same species as they.