Nancy Duarte Quotes

Not only must the message be correctly delivered, but the messenger himself must be such as to recommend it to acceptance.

Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so that the other half may reach you.

One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plow out again through the side of his head.

The best thing you can give as a leader is a reason to trust. People want to trust. They're hungry for it. But they're selective. They'll only give it to a motivator, a communicator, a teacher, a real person. Someone who in good times and bad always does the right thing.

Without credible communication, and a lot of it, the hearts and minds of others are never captured.

Anything that causes you to doubt, to raise either objections or just concerns about it - and they always put the information right at the bottom of the screen so you can't really read it - every time you see a company do that, the ad becomes less effective. The communication becomes less effective.

I was at a bar, and this guy bumped into me, and he did not apologize, and he said, "Move!" I thought that was rude, so I said, "Go to hell!" Then I started to run. He caught up to me. He had a mustache, a goatee, a pair of earrings, sunglasses, a ponytail and he was wearing a hat. He said, "Hey, you got a lot of nerve!" I said, "Hey, you got a lot of... cranium accessories!"

People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.

I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.

The most important thing to remember is you must know your audience.

Clarity moves much more efficiently than violence or stress.

The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication.

Never mistake legibility for communication.

The aim of talk should be like the aim of a flying arrow -- to hit the mark; but to this end there must be a mark to hit, that is, there must be a listener.

In a sea of stories, find the right one to tell, and the right way to tell it.

Good writin' ain't necessarily good readin'.

You have to think not about what you mean but about what people hear.

The proverb says that 'The answer to a fool is silence'. Observation, however, indicates that almost any other answer will have the same effect in the long run.

The following are the universally fundamental laws of literary communication: 1. one must have something to communicate; 2. one must have someone to whom to communicate it; 3. one must really communicate it, not merely express it for oneself alone. Otherwise it would be more to the point to remain silent.

Honesty is one part of eloquence. We persuade others by being in earnest ourselves.

I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

it makes a great difference to a speaker whether he has something to say, or has to say something.

It doesn't matter how much we know, it matters how clearly others can understand what we know.

I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.

I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted.