Quotes about communication
page 24

“A machine has value only as it produces more than it consumes — so check your value to the community.”

Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) American university teacher (1879-1962)

As quoted in Quote Unquote (A Handbook of Quotations) (2005) by M. P. Singh, p. 86

Chris Murphy photo

“You have entire communities whose biologies are being changed by gun violence.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

"Full transcript: POLITICO's Glenn Thrush interviews Chris Murphy" http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/full-transcript-glenn-thrush-chris-murphy, Politico, 8 August 2016.

Gardiner Spring photo

“Aurangzeb’s religious policy had created a division in the Indian society. Communal antagonisms resulted in communal riots at Banaras, Narnaul (1672) and Gujarat (1681) where Hindus, in retaliation, destroyed mosques. Temples were destroyed in Marwar after 1678 and in 1680-81, 235 temples were destroyed in Udaipur. Prince Bhim of Udaipur retaliated by attacking Ahmadnagar and demolishing many mosques, big and small, there. Similarly, there was opposition to destruction of temples in the Amber territory, which was friendly to the Mughals. Here religious fairs continued to be held and idols publicly worshipped even after the temples had been demolished.64 In the Deccan the same policy was pursued with the same reaction. In April 1694, the imperial censor had tried to prevent public idol worship in Jaisinghpura near Aurangabad. The Vairagi priests of the temple were arrested but were soon rescued by the Rajputs.65 Aurangzeb destroyed temples throughout the country. He destroyed the temples at Mayapur (Hardwar) and Ayodhya, but “all of them are thronged with worshippers, even those that are destroyed are still venerated by the Hindus and visited by the offering of alms.” Sometimes he was content with only closing down those temples that were built in the midst of entirely Hindu population, and his officers allowed the Hindus to take back their temples on payment of large sums of money. “In the South, where he spent the last twenty-seven years of his reign, Aurangzeb was usually content with leaving many Hindu temples standing… in the Deccan where the suppression of rebellion was not an easy matter… But the discontent occasioned by his orders could not be thus brought to an end.””

Hindu resistance to such vandalism year after year and decade after decade throughout the length and breadth of the country can rather be imagined than described.
Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 6

Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi photo

“He [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] wanted to say that if certain people have created troubles for the Jewish community they should bear the expenses, and it is not others who should pay for that.”

Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi (1960) Iranian politician

As quoted in Anti-Israel remarks 'misunderstood,' says Iranian official, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 16 December 2005 http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2005/12/16/iran_holocaust051216.html,

Koenraad Elst photo
H. G. Wells photo
Alfred Binet photo

“When we attempt to understand the inmost nature of the outer world, we stand before it as before absolute darkness. There probably exists in nature, outside of ourselves, neither colour, odour, force, resistance, space, nor anything that we know as sensation. Light is produced by the excitement of the optic nerve, and it shines only in our brain; as to the excitement itself, there is nothing to prove that it is luminous; outside of us is profound darkness, or even worse, since darkness is the correlation of light. In the same way, all the sonorous excitements which assail us, the creakings of machines, the sounds of nature, the words and cries of our fellows are produced by excitements of our acoustic nerve; it is in our brain that noise is produced, outside there reigns a dead silence. The same may be said of all our other senses.

...In short, our nervous system, which enables us to communicate with objects, prevents us, on the other hand, from knowing their nature. It is an organ of relation with the outer world; it is also, for us, a cause of isolation. We never go outside ourselves. We are walled in. And all we can say of matter and of the outer world is, that it is revealed to us solely by the sensations it affords us, that it is the unknown cause of our sensations, the inaccessible excitant of our organs of the senses, and that the ideas we are able to form as to the nature and the properties of that excitant, are necessarily derived from our sensations, and are subjective to the same degree as those sensations themselves.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 25

Pierre Hadot photo
Randal Marlin photo
David Cameron photo
Gerd von Rundstedt photo
P. W. Botha photo

“The free world wants to feed South Africa to the Red Crocodile [communism], to appease its hunger.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As cited in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 90

“The transition from the concept of information in the technical (communication engineering) sense to the semantic (theory of meaning) sense was indeed difficult, if not impossible.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1956), as quoted in: Richard C. Huseman (1977) Readings in interpersonal & organizational communication. p. 35
1950s

Georg Brandes photo
Richard Overy photo
Kofi Annan photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The press is a group confessional form that provides communal participation. The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.””

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 204

Eric Foner photo
Frank Chodorov photo
Warren Farrell photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

“Muslim ‘community’ in India had remained sharply divided into two mutually exclusive segments throughout the centuries of Islamic invasions and rule over large parts of the country. On the one hand, there were the descendants of conquerors who came from outside or who identified themselves completely with the conquerors - the Arabs, the Turks, the Iranians, and the Afghans. They glorified themselves as the Ashrãf (high-born, noble) or Ahli-i-Daulat (ruling race) and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat (custodians of religion). On the other hand, there were converts from among the helpless Hindus who were looked down upon by the Ashrãf and described as the Ajlãf (low-born, ignoble) and Arzãl (mean, despicable) depending upon the Hindu castes from which the converts came. The converts were treated as Ahl-i-Murãd (servile people) who were expected to obey the Ahl-i-Daulat and Ahl-i-Sa‘adat abjectly. Shah Waliullah (1703-62) and his son Abdul Aziz (1746-1822) were the first to notice this situation and felt frightened that the comparatively small class of the Ashrãf was most likely to be drowned in the surrounding sea of Hindu Kafirs. … They had to turn to the neo-Muslims. The neo-Muslims, however, had little interest in waging wars for Islam. They had, therefore, to be fully Islamized, that is, alienated completely from their ancestral society and culture. That is why the Tabligh movement was started.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

Goel, Sita Ram (1995). Muslim separatism: Causes and consequences. ISBN 9788185990262

Mahatma Gandhi photo

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf
1940s

Thorstein Veblen photo
Adlai Stevenson photo

“Because we believe in the free mind we are also fighting those who, in the name of anti-Communism, would assail the community of freedom itself.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

As quoted in Portrait — Adlai E. Stevenson : Politician, Diplomat, Friend (1965) by Alden Whitman

Ambrose Bierce photo
Estes Kefauver photo
Jerome Frank photo
Ray Kurzweil photo

“The basic feasibility of communicating in both directions between electronic devices and biological neurons has already been demonstrated.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

Winston S. Churchill photo
Hillary Clinton photo
Howard Zahniser photo

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a member of the natural community, a wanderer who visits but does not remain and whose travels leave only trails.”

Howard Zahniser (1906–1964) American environmentalist

From an early draft of the Wilderness Act (S. 1176, submitted to the Senate 11 February 1957, as reprinted in The Living Wilderness volume 21, number 59, Winter-Spring 1956-57, p. 26-36)

Edgar Froese photo

“We can now return to the NCERT guideline which proclaims that the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in medieval India shall be regarded as political rather than religious. There is no justification for such a characterisation of the conflict. The Muslims at least were convinced that they were waging a religious war against the Hindu infidels. The conflict can be regarded as political only if the NCERT accepts the very valid proposition that Islam has never been a religion, and that it started and has remained a political ideology of terrorism with unmistakable totalitarian trends and imperialist ambitions. The first premises as well as the procedures of Islam bear a very close resemblance to those of Communism and Nazism. Allah is only the predecessor of the Forces of Production invoked by the Communists, and of the Aryan Race invoked by the Nazis.
My heart sinks at the very idea of such a sinister scheme being sponsored by an educational agency set up by the government of a democratic country. It is an insidious attempt at thought-control and brainwashing. Having been a student of these processes in Communist countries, I have a strong suspicion that this document has also sprung from the same sort of mind. This mind has presided for long over the University Grants Commission and other educational institutions, and has been aided and abetted by the residues of Islamic imperialism masquerading as secularists.”

The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)

Jeffrey Montgomery photo
Gopal Krishna Gokhale photo
Francisco Franco photo

“The whole secret of the campaigns unleashed against Spain can be explained in two words: Masonry and Communism… we have to extirpate these two evils from our land.”

Francisco Franco (1892–1975) Spanish general and dictator

Writing under the alias Jakin Boor in the journal Arriba in an article, "Masonry and Communism" (14 December 1946), as quoted in Franco: A Biography by Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurúạ, p. 71

Anastas Mikoyan photo

“Like Lenin Comrade Stalin is a leader of a higher type. He is a mountain eagle, without fear in the fight, who boldly leads the bolshevik party on unexplored roads toward the total victory of Communism.”

Anastas Mikoyan (1895–1978) Russian revolutionary and Soviet statesman

Statement of 13 March 1939, as quoted in "Facts on Communism" (1960) by the United States Congress, p. 157

Allen West (politician) photo
Max Horkheimer photo
Francis Escudero photo
David Brooks photo

“…list of different spheres of her life: reflection, creativity, community, intimacy, and service.”

David Brooks. The Social Animal (2011), p. 342
2010s

Jadunath Sarkar photo
Robert Hooke photo
Peter F. Drucker photo
Grover Cleveland photo

“The trusts and combinations—the communism of pelf—whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserved, should not be forgotten nor forgiven.”

Grover Cleveland (1837–1908) 22nd and 24th president of the United States

Letter to Representative Thomas C. Catchings (27 August 1894), reported in Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850–1908, ed. Allan Nevins (1933), p. 365

Calvin Coolidge photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Baldassarre Castiglione photo

“Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.”

Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) Italian Renaissance author (1478-1529)

Però l'anima, aliena dai vicii, purgata dai studi della vera filosofia, versata nella vita spirituale ed esercitata nelle cose dell'intelletto, rivolgendosi alla contemplazion della sua propria sustanzia, quasi da profundissimo sonno risvegliata, apre quegli occhi che tutti hanno e pochi adoprano, e vede in se stessa un raggio di quel lume che è la vera imagine della bellezza angelica a lei communicata, della quale essa poi communica al corpo una debil umbra.
Bk. 4, ch. 68; p. 300.
Souced, Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528)

Vladimir Putin photo

“Russia must realise its full potential in high-tech sectors such as modern energy technology, transport and communications, space and aircraft building.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

2006- 2010
Source: Annual Address to the Federal Assembly http://kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2006/05/10/1823_type70029type82912_105566.shtml, (10 May 2006)

Peter Paul Rubens photo
Talal Abu-Ghazaleh photo
Bell Hooks photo

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

Noam Chomsky photo
Auguste Rodin photo

“The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art

Christine O'Donnell photo

“The Ryan White Care Act provides money for community-based counseling centers. While that may sound noble and compassionate, we know from experience that "AIDS education" becomes a platform for the homosexual community to recruit adolescents and lure teens into a self-destructive sexual lifestyle.”

Christine O'Donnell (1969) American Tea Party politician and former Republican Party candidate

Concerned Women for America press release
2010-09-15
Christine O'Donnell Does Not Like Gays.
Instaputz
http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2010/09/christine-odonnell-does-not-like-gays.html
2010-10-20

Vyjayanthimala photo

“aAs a creative artiste dedicated to a spiritual art form I was deeply pained by the communal violence in Gujarat.”

Vyjayanthimala (1936) Indian actress, politician & dancer

Vyjayanthimala still cuts a striking figure tall

Phillip Abbott Luce photo

“To appreciate sculpture is to look, to touch, to sense, to learn and communicate.”

Fred Conlon (1943–2005) Irish sculptor

citation needed
Attributed

Derryn Hinch photo

“You all should feel angry tonight, very angry, because yet again the legal system in this country has let you down. A court has ruled that a man who committed a ghastly crime against a little girl should walk free and unsupervised. The details are distasteful, but you should know. Hans Lester Watt abducted and raped a three-year-old girl. The 42-year-old was drunk when he took the toddler, and assulted her so badly, she needed medical attention. He said it was revenge, to get back at the innocent little girl's grandmother, whom he claimed had insulted his dead mother. Watt was jailed for 11 years. When due for release last year, the Queensland Attorney-General, understandably, applied to have him classified as a dangerous sexual offender. That meant his jail term could be extended, or at least he'd be released with a supervision order. Remember, this was a three-year-old girl. The court refused the request. The judge found the circumstances were "unique" — that Watt was not an unacceptable risk. Well, I agree it was unique — thank God the rape of a three-year-old doesn't happen often in this country. A psychiatrist said the chances of Watt re-offending were low if he did not drink alcohol, moderate if he did drink, and said the best chance of rehabilitation was if he lived in a dry Aboriginal community. The Attorney-General appealed the judge's decision. Well, yesterday, the Supreme Court turned him down, upheld the earlier ruling that let the child rapist walk free — unsupervised. My mantra for years has been "Who's looking after the children?" In my opinion, the Queensland Supreme Court certainly is not — this decision was a travesty.”

Derryn Hinch (1944) New Zealand–Australian media personality

Today Tonight, 24 April 2013.

Enoch Powell photo

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Irina Bokova photo
Alfred de Zayas photo

“One of the problems that we have in the human rights community is that special interests often forget the interests of other victims, and there’s competition among victims expressions that are unnecessary.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

UN expert on democracy highlights importance of free expression, information http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=46355&Cr=information&Cr1=#.Um9rdr_3DjA.
2013

Joseph McCarthy photo
Edward B. Titchener photo
Frank Miller photo
Harold Holt photo

“Seek God. Hear from God. Receive his vision. Let it overwhelm you. Consume you. Burden you. Tell the vision. Cast the vision. Communicate the vision. And watch it spread.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

Sayyid Qutb photo
John Scalzi photo

“When you control communication, you can hide anything you want.”

Source: The Last Colony (2007), Chapter 5 (p. 97)

T. E. Hulme photo

“It is a delicate & difficult art fitting rhythm to an idea…communicating momentary phases in a poet's mind.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Speculations (Essays, 1924)

Alexis De Tocqueville photo

“It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853 Selected Letters, p. 296 as cited in Toqueville's Road Map p. 103 http://books.google.com/books?id=fLL6Bil2gtcC&pg=PA103&dq=%22almost+never+when+a+state+of+things+is+the+most+detestable+that+it+is+smashed%22
1850s and later

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey photo
Huey P. Newton photo
Cass Elliot photo
Russell Brand photo
Abby Stein photo
Sergei Akhromeyev photo
Syed Ahmed Khan photo

“To the Muslim community Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was and is like the eye which weeps for the suffering of any and every part of the body.”

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

Azhar Mohammed New Age Islam http://www.newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamIslamicPersonalities_1.aspx?ArticleID=1955
About

Bill Hybels photo

“Authentic Christianity is a supernatural walk with a living, dynamic, communicating God.”

Bill Hybels (1951) American writer

Too Busy Not to Pray (2008, InterVarsity Press)

Gloria Estefan photo
Ugo Cavallero photo
Buckminster Fuller photo
George Plimpton photo

“A deep, deep sadness. You know there's a theologian named Michael Novack who's quoted as saying that 'a community is better off losing its opera house, or its museum, or its CHURCH' — here's a theologian speaking — 'than its ball team'. Brooklyn has never been the same since the Dodgers were taken away.”

George Plimpton (1927–2003) journalist, writer, editor, actor

In Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball discussing his reaction to and opinion of the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles for the 1958 MLB season.

Allan Boesak photo