People often say to me, 'I understand what you are talking about intellectually, but I don't really feel it, I don't realize it,' and I am apt to reply, 'I wonder whether you do understand it intellectually, because if you did you would also feel it.'
I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
Four years ago in speaking of a Jewish nation one ran the risk of being regarded ridiculous. Today he makes himself ridiculous who denies the existence of a Jewish nation.
We have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary. This now moment, in which I'm talking and you're listening, is eternity.
You're always looking to make it a bit fresh. I want to make sure people are constantly surprised and interested, and we're always talking to the directors about that. It's a big challenge to find people that can do it.
That is not the best sermon which makes the hearers go away talking to one another and praising the speaker, but which makes them go away thoughtful and serious, and hastening to be alone.
MALTHUSIAN, adj. Pertaining to Malthus and his doctrines, who believed in artificially limiting population, but found that it could not be done by talking. Herod of Judea, all the famous soldiers have been practical exponents of the Malthusian idea.
I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.
Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! ... Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It's the most loquacious of all. You really can't get a word in edgeways.