Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Riesman

Nowadays, truth is the greatest news. The mass media are the wholesalers, the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.

David Hume

No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.

Audre Lorde

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Arnold Bennett

Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.

Antonin Artaud

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Denis Waitley

When you speak, ask questions. Don't lecture.

Dennis Miller

[The Internet] ... is an amazing communications tool that's bringing the whole world together. I mean, you sit down to sign on to America Online in your hometown, and it's just staggering to think that at the same moment, halfway around the world, in China, someone you've never met is sitting at their computer, hearing the exact same busy signal that you're hearing.

Alain de Botton

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

Charles Kennedy

Music and politics are in essence about communication. Without over-stretching the analogy I do feel a sense of rhythm is important in getting your message across.

David Riesman

America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese.

Ben Stiller

I'm not an expert on the Malaysian sense of humor.

Dick Cavett

Great humorists are great insulters.

Alan Coren

I sometimes wonder if the manufacturers of foolproof items keep a fool or two on their payroll to test things.

Al Capone

I don't even know what street Canada is on.

Charles Kingsley

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands

Charles Churchill

A joke's a very serious thing.

Peter Jennings

Always have a sense of humor about life - you'll need it - but always be courteous to boot.

Robert Mankoff

The interesting thing about humor is that in humor, you - in logic, something is A or not A. In humor, it's both A and not A.

David Hume

There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason, or from Sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgement of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

David Hume

Everything is sold to skill and labor; and where nature furnishes the materials, they are still rude and unfinished, till industry, ever active and intelligent, refines them from their brute state, and fits them for human use and convenience.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Even in cerebral roles that are seemingly intelligent and nothing else, I think it's so important to wrap your characterization in a physical form as well.

Benedict Cumberbatch

'Sherlock' fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they've gone through my back catalogue and got what I've done, why and how I've done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me.

Frederic Bastiat

I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State... Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.

Dennis Miller

Only man is a narcissistic enough species to think that a highly evolved alien life force would travel across billions and billions of light-years- a group of aliens so intelligent, so insouciant, so utterly above it all, they feel no need whatsoever to equip their spacecraft with windows so that they can gaze out on all that celestial beauty-but then immediately upon landing, their first impulse is to get in some hick's ass with a flashlight.

Alain de Botton

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Charles Darwin

If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and over their burrows, as seems the case, they deserve to be called intelligent; for they act in nearly the same manner as would man under similar circumstances.

Charles Darwin

Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.