Quotes about communication
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“All it means is that, while our minds may have trouble communicating, our bodies don't have any problem at all."

"I don't think it's that simple."

"Sure it is."

"The earth moved," she said softly. "That has to be more than bodies communicating.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Kiss an Angel

Problem, Thinking

“The biggest communication problem is we do not listen to understand.
We listen to reply.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

Understanding, Problem

“But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Tear, Forgetting

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.” I waited in silence”

Elena Ferrante (1943) Italian writer

Source: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

Women, Children, Home, Intelligence

“Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.”

Franklin Foer (1974) American journalist

Source: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

Religion, Parting

“If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.”

Greg Mortenson (1957) American mountaineer and humanitarian

Source: Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Education, Girl, Boy

“The energy of life entering and leaving your body flows evenly throughout the universe. With that current, the mind of the cosmos communicates with all things.”

Ilchi Lee (1950) South Korean businessman

Source: LifeParticle Meditation: A Practical Guide to Healing and Transformation

Life, Universe

“Surely the Shadowhunter community must honor you and hold you in high esteem as a gentleman who has truly advanced their race. No, Henry said sadly. Mostly they wish that I would stop suggesting new inventions and cease setting fire to things.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Princess

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

Effort

“We're taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don't have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool let's somebody tell them who the enemy is.”

Assata Shakur (1947) American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army

Source: Assata: In Her Own Words, p. 152
Source: Assata: An Autobiography

Age, Fools, Idea

“My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community.”

Huey P. Newton book Revolutionary Suicide

Source: Revolutionary Suicide (1973), p. 190

Death, People, Fear

“Silence isn't golden and it surely doesn't mean consent, so start practicing the art of communication.”

T.D. Jakes (1957) American bishop

Source: Let it Go: Forgive So You Can Be Forgiven

Art, Silence

“Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Einstein's Reply to Criticisms" (1949), The World As I See It (1949)
Context: A man's value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.
And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.
The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.

Life, Health, Thinking, Dependency

“A Christian community should do as Jesus did: propose and not impose. Its attraction must lie in the radiance cast by the love of brothers.”

Jean Vanier (1928–2019) Canadian humanitarian

Source: Community And Growth

Love, Lie

“Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

“The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Life, Freedom

“The one word love means too little for what it is. It doesn't communicate even a fraction of the feelings involved. Love. The word is not enough for what it is. Love. Love.”

James Frey book A Million Little Pieces

Source: A Million Little Pieces

Love, Feeling

“In fact, the truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Source: The Necessity of Atheism and Other Essays

Truth

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Star, Universe, Night

“The odd thing about this form of communication is you're more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many… somethings. So, thanks.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

“The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”

Arthur C. Clarke book 2001: A Space Odyssey

Source: 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.”

Ravi Zacharias (1946) Indian philosopher

1990s
Source: [Can Man Live Without God, 1994, 9780849939433, 12]

Truth, Beauty, Art, Night

“All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Lie, Feeling

“Know the quiet place within your heart and touch the rainbow of possibility; be alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Source: The Book of Guys

Jerk, Heart

“Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Eating Animals

Source: Eating Animals

Children, World, Family, Change

“I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books…. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.”

Michael Ondaatje book The English Patient

Source: The English Patient

Women, Men, Books, History

“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

War, History, Fish

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) American journalist

Source: Liberty and the news

“The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

Sincerity

“We live in an age of confusion and thirst in which the advantages of communication are greater than those of secrecy.”

Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher

Source: Esoterism as Principle and as Way

Age

“Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

As quoted in What Color is Your Paradigm: Thinking for Shaping Life and Results (2003) by Howard Edson, p. 184
Source: The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marx

“The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

Cormac McCarthy book All the Pretty Horses

Source: All the Pretty Horses

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

Love, Dreams, Personality

“people have character strength but they lack communication skills, and that undoubtedly affects the quality of relationships as well.”

Stephen R. Covey book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Source: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

People

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

People

“In every community, there is work to be done.
In every nation, there are wounds to heal.
In every heart, there is the power to do it.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Heart

“Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth

Children, World, Learning, Childhood

“If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible

Love, Dreams, Personality

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a single conception of ability. At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

TED Conference http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Intelligence, Sense, Heart, Dependency

“Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything”

Lance Armstrong (1971) professional cyclist from the USA

Knowledge

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me, whose eyes would reply to mine.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Feeling

“The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Men, God, Question, Time

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental. The unfriendliness of society to his activity is difficult for the artists to accept. Yet this very hostility can act as a lever for true liberation... Both the sense of community and of security depend on the familiar. Free of them, transcendental experiences become possible.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 167

Hostility, Travel, Sense, Dependency

“They are very young. And on their earth, as they call it, they never communicate with other planets. They revolve about all alone in space."
"Oh," the thin beast said. "Aren't they lonely?”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time

“The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”

Dallas Willard (1935–2013) American philosopher

Love, God, History, Personality

“If humans were to model the lifestyle displayed by healthy community of cells, our societies and our planet would be more peaceful and vital”

Bruce H. Lipton (1944) US biologist

Peace

“There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Taxation No Tyranny https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Taxation_No_Tyranny (1775)

Pain, Parting

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Personality

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love's path is communication.”

Bell Hooks book All About Love: New Visions

Source: All About Love: New Visions

Love

“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”

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

Source: Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

Way

“Marriage is compromise and hard work, and then more hard work and communication and compromise. And then work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Marriage, Hope

“Dishonesty increases disorder exponentially. It's hard enough to communicate when you're telling the truth.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Kiss of the Highlander

Truth

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

World

“Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.”

Anne Rice The Wolf Gift

Source: The Wolf Gift

Life, Truth, Support, Nature

“I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Source: Walden & Civil Disobedience

Men

“Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was 'Why did you start this thing?' and the answer was 'Me?”

Joe Haldeman book The Forever War

Source: The Forever War

War, Question, Falseness

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"My Credo", a speech to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932), as published in Einstein: A Life in Science (1994) by Michael White and John Gribbin, p. 262.
1930s

Life, Truth, Justice, Beauty

“If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Music, Understanding

“Battle with unconditioned breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Life

“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

“Capitalism has survived communism. Now, it eats away at itself.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship

“Geoff: We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.”

Alan Bennett (1934) English actor, author

Source: Getting On, Act 1 (1972).

People

“Macey couldn't decide whether to be intrigued that Hale was walking around with a state-of-the-art covert communications device or be jealous because she'd been caught without one of her own.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Double Crossed: A Spies and Thieves Story

Art

“It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Bruce-Partington Plans

“Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

In reference to the Alabama Council on Human Relations, an organization which was joined by King, whose church's meeting room was used to hold monthly meetings for the Montgomery chapter the council. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)
1950s
Context: Although the Montgomery council never had a large membership, it played an important role. As the only truly interracial group in Montgomery, it served to keep the desperately needed channels of communication open between the races.
Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated. In providing an avenue of communication, the council was fulfilling a necessary condition for better race relations in the South.

Men, Hate, Fear