communication quotes

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

-T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot
  Four Quartets,'Little Gidding', pt.1.

I've often thought I should like to have a set of postcards printed: 'Dear Sir or Madam,Thank you for your communication.Go to hell.Yours sincerely.'

- Sir Claude Aurelius Elliott
Quoted in the Times Literary Supplement, 22  Jan1988.

Conversation is more often likely to be an attempt at deliberate evasion, deliberate confusion, rather than communication.We're all cheats and liars, really.

-James Jones
  Interview in the Paris Review, Winter.

The sociologists of knowledge have been among those raising high the banner which reads: 'We don't know if what we say is true, but it is at least significant.' The sociologists and psychologists engaged in the study of publicopinionand mass communications aremost often found in the opposed camp of the empiricists† 'We don't know that what we say is particularly significant, but it is at least true.'

- Robert King Merton
  Social Theory and Social Structure (rev. edn), pt.3, introduction.

In terms ofcommunication,Japan isliketheblack hole of the universe. It receives signals but does not emit them.

-Tadao Umaseo
Quoted in David Halberstam The Reckoning (1986).