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Communication Quotes

Shakespeare leads, then Marshall McLuhan, Homer, Molière and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is the one to read for sources. The Tractatus (1922) has the limits of my language meaning the limits of my world, and The Blue Book (1931) reminds us that we do not use language according to strict rules, since it was not taught to us by means of strict rules. Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779) has the shortest version of the page’s theme: language is the dress of thought.

Two entries carry flags. “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place” is credited to George Bernard Shaw and marked misattributed. “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence” is credited to Publilius Syrus and disputed.

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Most quoted on communication:

The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

William Carlos Williams

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.

Dionysius I of Syracuse

Language is articulated, limited sound organized for the purpose of expression.

Benedetto Croce

The language others speak to us, from childhood, shapes the attitudes and beliefs that ground how we use all our powers of action.

Jay Lemke

An honest blunder in the use of the language is not dishonest... What is honest is not dishonest.

Charles Bowen, Baron Bowen Angus v. Clifford (1891)

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

Edward R. Murrow

Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.

John Ashbery

If your language lacks poetry and paradox, it’s unequal to the task of accounting for actuality. Otherwise anything radically new is literally unspeakable.

Bob Black The Libertarian as Conservative (1984)

O people, the first day is difficult but if I live I shall deliver a proper speech.

Uthman

Men always say they didn't mean it that way. You would think they spoke a different language.

Robert Jordan Lord of Chaos (1994)

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

Eugene Wigner

A language in the full semiotical sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules.

Charles W. Morris p. 48; as cited in: Adam Schaff (1962)

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Niklas Luhmann Luhmann (1988)

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

T. E. Hulme Notes on Language and Style (1929)

Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before.

H. Russell Bernard

The mother tongue is propaganda.

Marshall McLuhan

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

Jeff Bezos

Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks.

David Crystal

"Recent economic and technical growth in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei demands a common regional language to foster linguistic and literary understanding in these interconnected & frequent activities."

Hary Gunarto

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