Abbie Hoffman Quotes

Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.

The organization is a way for people to find us and deal with us and know how we operate.

Tell the audience what you're going to say, say it; then tell them what you've said.

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in person.

It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Organization, not machine. Get that. Organization, not machine.

I think structure is so deep in us. We put it in stories we tell our friends or in emails we write. We want it. It's how we create meaning.

Format is just the language. Content is the only thing that is important. Form is like handwriting. Whether you write in a scribble or clean handwriting or type it, the content remains the same. You want to write in clean hand, in a kind of a clear format only because it is aesthetically pleasing. I can scribble, that's also fine.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

Having the right message is what matters. It's not who you reach, it's what you say.

Set all things in their own peculiar place, and know that order is the greatest grace.

The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.

If you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking.

Order and system are nobler things than power.

Do you ever wonder what happens to the words that we send Do they bend, do they break from the flight that they take And come back together again with a whole new meaning In a brand new sense, completely unrelated to the one I sent ((Did You Get My Message?))

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.