Conversation Quotes

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

Roland Barthes

I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull.

William Congreve

There is nothing that exasperates people more than a display of superior ability or brilliance in conversation. They seem pleased at the time, but their envy makes them curse the conversationalist in their heart.

Johnson

The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.

Sir William Temple

Speech has been given to man to disguise his thoughts.

CharlesMaurice de Talleyrand

Conversation has a kind of charm about it, an insinuating and insidious something that elicits secrets just like love or liquor.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

I don't mind how much my ministers talk -- as long as they do what I say.

Margaret Thatcher

The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

John Steinbeck

Man does not speak because he thinks; he thinks because he speaks. Or rather, speaking is no different than thinking: to speak is to think.

Octavio Paz

It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies.

Richard D. Rosen

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.

Richard Rorty

There is no index so sure as the voice.

Tancred

How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.

Soren Kierkegaard

Why doesn't the fellow who says, I'm no speechmaker let it go at that instead of giving a demonstration?

Kin Hubbard

The longer I live, the more I have come to value the gift of eloquence. Every American youth, if he desires for any purpose to get influence over his countrymen in an honorable way, will seek to become a good public speaker.

George F. Hoar

From my earliest days I have enjoyed an attractive impediment in my speech. I have never permitted the use of the word stammer. I can't say it myself.

Patrick Campbell

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Frank Moore Colby