Communication Failure Quotes

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Making a speech on economics is a lot like pissing down your leg. It seems hot to you, but it never does to anyone else.

Any order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood

Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange.

A language is a map of our failures

It's a difficult undertaking. I've been married for four years and I see this movie as a cautionary tale about people who've gone deeply out of communication.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

The chances of catastrophe grow as organizations grow in number and size, and as internal communications become more time consuming and less intelligible.

When the president of the United States goes out at, you know, 8:00 o'clock in the morning and then his own party votes gets him 2 to 1 in the house, you know that somehow a message isn't getting out. It takes real leadership.

I couldn't speak enough Spanish. I couldn't make myself understood on that club.

If there is one general law of communication it is that we never communicate as effectively as we think we do.

Why do people who consider themselves good communicators often fail to actually hear each other? Often it's due to a mismatch of styles: To someone who prefers to vent, someone who prefers to explain seems patronizing; explainers experience venters as volatile.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.

Words are useless, especially sentences.

When you're being earnest, people think you're being sarcastic, and when you're being sarcastic, they think you're being earnest. The moral in all this, of course, is that people should never attempt to communicate.

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints that you do.

I'm terrible at collaborating with people; nothing ever ends up coming out good.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale.

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

I don't know. I don't have a fax machine, so I didn't get that message.

The key to happiness, she said, is tolerance of those who do not do as you do.' 'What if those who do not do as you do are gunning you down?' I said.... Alaska frowned. 'Guns are intolerant. Guns are a failure of communication.