Quotations: Communication

This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
Anon

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
Russell Baker

The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.
J. G. Ballard

It seemed rather incongruous that in a society of supersophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.
Erma Bombeck

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
Pearl Buck

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
William E. Channing

A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.
Arthur C. Clarke

Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.
Frank Moore Colby

Men and women belong to different species, and communication between them is a science still in its infancy.
Bill Cosby

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
Peter Drucker

To improve communications, work not on the utterer, but the recipient.
Peter Drucker

It happened once that a youth and a maiden beheld each other in a public assembly for the first time…The youth gazed with great delight upon the beautiful face until he caught the maiden’s eye…The mysterious communication that is established across a house between two entire strangers, by this means moves all the springs of wonder.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The advertising industry is one of our most basic forms of communication and, allegedly, of information. Yet, obviously, much of this ostensible information is not purveyed to inform but to manipulate and to achieve a result -- to make somebody think he needs something that very possibly he doesn't need, or to make him think one version of something is better than another version when the ground for such a belief really doesn't exist.
Marvin E. Frankel

Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence without communications is irrelevant.
Gen Alfred Gray

All art is communication of the artists' ideas, sounds, thoughts; without that no one will support the artist.
Lionel Hampton

A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.
Robert M. Hutchins

A book ... unlike a television program, moving picture or any other modern means of communication ... can wait for years, yet be available at any moment when it happens to be needed.
Joseph Wood Krutch

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.
G. C. Lichtenberg

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

It is not enough to show people how to live better: there is a mandate for any group with enormous powers of communication to show people how to be better.
Marya Mannes

The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.
Pope John Paul II

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
J. B. Priestley

Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
J. B. Priestley

Art is the indespensible medium for the communication of a moral idea.
Ayn Rand

Increase your personal power through positive and powerful communication. Recognize and eliminate negative self talk.
Caterina Rando

Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world's first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less.
Al Ries

The mass media are the wholesalers; the peer groups, the retailers of the communications industry.
David Riesman

All of life is a risk; in fact we're not going to get out alive. Casualness leads to casualties. Communication is the ability to affect other people with words.
Jim Rohn

True interactivity is not about clicking on icons or downloading files, it's about encouraging communication.
Edwin Schlossberg

Electronic communication is an instantaneous and illusory contact that creates a sense of intimacy without the emotional investment that leads to close friendships.
Clifford Stoll

Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints.
Henry David Thoreau

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.
Barbara Tuchman

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West