Deborah Tannen Quotes

People are always trying to draw simplistic dialectics that can capture things.

I don't believe there's two sides to every story. It's black and white. There's right and wrong.

The issues at the core of our national debates are more complicated than can be explained in soundbites and slogans by talking-heads and special guests. The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

If you don't have a good case, and you don't have a good message, then shining a light on it is not going to get you very far.

Don't be a victim of the urgent. In the long run, much of what seems so pressing right now won't even matter. What you do with your children will matter forever.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

Liberals roll their eyes about going on "Oprah" to reach a mass audience by using language that anyone can understand even if you majored in semiotics at Yale. We look down on people we don't agree with. It doesn't serve us well.

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 surest way to identify those who won't succeed at weight loss is that they tend to say things like "My goal is to lose ten pounds." Weight targets often work in the short run. But if you need willpower to keep the weight off, you're doomed in the long run. The only way to succeed in the long run is by using a system that bypasses your need for willpower.

I feel it’s important to talk about the complex issues affecting us. And these are complex issues. I think it’s insulting to an audience to make them sit and watch a film and then give them a message in one sentence.

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

in the very long run any success devours - and perhaps also corrupts.

[on marriage equality] It literally is a threat to the nation's survival in the long run.

If you cannot - in the long run - tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless.

My parents taught me as a kid: do your work. Do it well. Try as hard as you can, whatever it is. It will one day, for the long run, it will make some sort of change somewhere.

My go-to default is to try to be nice, which I feel does less harm in the long run than trying to be, say, assertive. If I am nice and maybe too passive, I find that easier to live with.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

It's much easier to spend a lot of time making your microphone louder than it is working on making your message more compelling.

I guess if we do enough shows and keep doing it long enough, then people will get the picture. But I can't really be bothered if they don't get the picture. That's not my concern.

I think I'm able to reach a lot of folks, despite the fact that the conventional news media sometimes says, "You know, this speech is too long," or "It's too complicated," or "He needs to have better sound bites," or what have you.

In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.

Our gazes locked, so much passing between us. In those moments, I wasn't in a tent with him, on the run from those who regarded us as villains. There was no murderer to catch, no Strigoi trauma to overcome. There was just him and me and the feelings that had burned between us for so long.

Apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice.

I suspect victims; they win in the long run.