When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

 —James Earl Jones

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

 —Dorothy Nevill

There is a confusing and uncertain period when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.

 —Vaclav Havel

It has not been for nothing that the word has remained man’s principal toy and tool; without the meanings and values it sustains, all man’s other tools would be worthless.

 —Lewis Mumford

For one word a man is often deemed to be wise, and for one word he is often deemed to be foolish. We should indeed be careful what we say.

 —Confucius

Fools live to regret their words, wise men to regret their silence.

 —Will Henry

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

 —Benjamin Franklin

Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.

 —Lily Tomlin

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

 —Mark Twain

Writing is the handmaiden of leadership. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of a strong declarative sentence.

 —William Zinsser

Although words exist for the most part for the transmission of ideas, there are some which produce such violent disturbance in our feelings that the role they play in the transmission of ideas is lost in the background.

— Albert Einstein

Morality in government begins with officials using words as honestly as possible to describe the truth.

 —David Gergen

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

 —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe