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.
Most quoted on communication:
I had a thing to say,
But I will fit it with some better time.
Speech was made to open man to man, and not to hide him; to promote commerce, and not betray it.
Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
The flowering moments of the mind
Drop half their petals in our speech.
It is never so difficult to speak as when we are ashamed of our silence.
His speech was a fine sample, on the whole,
Of rhetoric, which the learn'd call "rigmarole."
Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows
Where noun, and verb, and participle grows.
I feel as stupid, from all you've said
As if a mill-wheel whirled in my head.
The English language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever.