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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:

… and French and Italian were, it must be owned, somewhat unnecessary to one who considered her own language an unnecessary fatigue.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Romance and Reality (1831)

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which humans communicate than by the content of the communication. (p. 23)

Marshall McLuhan The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011)

All media of communications are cliches serving to enlarge man's scope of action, his patterns of associations and awareness. These media create environments that numb our powers of attention by sheer pervasiveness.

Marshall McLuhan

Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.

Patricia Hill Collins

The story of man’s infatuation with his language is an unending one. In a remote village of Africa, a wise Dogon man used to say “to be naked is to be speechless.” Power, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings, has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion.

Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (1989)

Words alike make the destiny of empires and of individuals. Ambition, love, hate, interest, vanity, have words for their engines, and need none more powerful. Language is a fifth element — the one by which all the others are swayed.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Francesca Carrara (1834)

While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome

Jonathan Rosa Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2018)

The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me.

William Kingdon Clifford The Ethics of Belief (1877)

They communicate, but their communication system is though touch, posture, looks – body language you could call it, but it goes a bit deeper than that. They can learn 400 or more signs in American sign language.

Jane Goodall Wanderlust #6 (2009)

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. That is, it creates a vision of the world that puts into the limelight the social misery that is usually hidden or concealed by the dominant viewpoints of a society. "Intellectual" in that sense simply means those who are willing to reflect critically upon themselves as well as upon the larger society and to ascertain whether there is some possibility of amelioration and betterment.

Cornel West

When you have a cause, the best way to express yourself is artistically

Hani Abbas Interview (2013)

There is a secret in communication: it consists in making oneself invisible through excessive exposure. (p. 13)

Mario Perniola

The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation.

Jan Hus A Companion to Jan Hus (2015)

Speech is one symptom of Affection
And Silence one—
The perfectest communication
Is heard of none—

Emily Dickinson

Languages, we know, do not stand still. New words are borrowed or invented. Others become obsolete. Morphology alters. So does pronunciation. Words are tools we use to communicate; they bend to our needs. Many change their meanings. Some acquire prestige, and others are degraded.

Henry Hitchings

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor's edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen
Above the sense of sense; so sensible
Seemeth their conference; their conceits have wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things.

William Shakespeare

The politician manufactures a language - a vocabulary and a rhetoric - which, if you accept it as wholly adequate, leads inevitably to the answers he wants and to the actions he wants. But the prior question is whether the language is adequate to the facts. And as the poet is concerned with making language do new work and finding out the implications of language, his answer is always : no .

Michael Roberts

From purest wells of English undefiled
None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child,
Who in the language of their farm field spoke
The wit and wisdom of New England folk.

John Greenleaf Whittier

That well known distinction between knowing that and knowing how fits the learning of a language....That is, we must distinguish between knowing how to speak or listen to words and knowing that about them. Learning a language is primarily the former.

Colin Murray Turbayne The Myth of Metaphor (1962)

The concept of communication includes all of those processes by which people influence one another... This definition is based on the premise that all actions and events have communicative aspects, as soon as they are perceived by a human being; it implies, furthermore, that such perception changes the information which an individual processes and therefor influences him.

Gregory Bateson

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