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“Only silence perfects silence.”
“Why do Planned Parenthood and their allies only ‘trust women’ and only want to hear women’s stories when they agree with Planned Parenthood? Why do they work to silence any women who disagree with them? Don’t our stories matter?”
“Planned Parenthood has consistently claimed to ‘care’ for women ‘no matter what’ and champion ‘women’s rights’ – yet they frantically silence any woman who thinks women deserve better than Planned Parenthood.”
“I am rather inclined to silence.”
“My voice went recently, never happened before, off like a tap. I had to sit in silence for nine days, chalkboard around my neck. Like an old-school mime. Like a kid in the naughty corner. Like a Victorian mute.”
“I am in total silence when I write – I don’t even like the sound of the dryer going – I like the quiet.”
“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”
“Since long I’ve held silence a remedy for harm.”
“I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.”
“I love ‘Breathless,’ and ‘Paris, Texas,’ and ‘Badlands.’ I was obsessed with those films in my teens. I remember watching ‘Badlands’ and being amazed that there were these scenes in which nobody said anything and the silence told the whole story.”
“Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”
“I always believed that my silence on several topics will be an advantage in the long run.”
“The tradition is a fence around the law; tithes are a fence around riches; vows are a fence around abstinence; a fence around wisdom is silence.”
“My first college roommate greeted me with a shocked silence followed by, ‘So… you’re black.’”
“Letterman, despite whatever idiotic (or worse?) things he may have done with women on his staff, was wise enough to realize that silence isn’t permanent and peace of mind can’t be bought.”
“When I’m off the road, my husband and I recharge our batteries. It’s a day of deep rest and connection with the spiritual, and that can be anything – going for a walk in nature, being in silence, burning incense.”
“I’ve always been the king of silence. I’ve always been a minimalist comedian. I’ve taken my influence from Jack Benny, who was the king of that… I’ve always done ‘less is more.’”
“The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.”
“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”
“In horror movies today it’s lots of fast cut shot and lots of loud noises on the soundtrack. I tried to do the opposite. Playing with silence for instance.”
“When I was a young person I went to the university and I learned a rational language, to think with the left side of the brain. But in the right side of the brain you have intuition and imagination. Words are not the truth; they indicate the way to go, but you need to go alone, in silence. Symbols have a language that kills the words.”
“You are not going to silence me. You are not going to silence America. You are literally like a little gangster thug. Rubio just threatened to silence me.”
“Dead silence is so much more foreign to me than people screaming at me, good or bad.”
“It’s very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.”
“Silence is the unbearable repartee.”
“We believe… that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.”
“A role needs a certain tone, so your own tone also changes. It’s not like I lock myself up in a room to get into the zone. It is based on what I am feeling, because the minute you try too much, weird things happen. Of course, for an intense role you need some silence, and you need to do a lot of thinking.”
“If it’s total freedom, I guess the ultimate thing you can go into is total silence between the audience and performer, with the performer projecting something he doesn’t even have to play.”
“When I talked to my medical friends about the strange silence on this subject in American medical magazines and textbooks, I gained the impression that here was a subject tainted with Socialism or with feminine sentimentality for the poor.”
“No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.”
“It is our lack of will that lies behind the continued denial of justice to Jean McConville. Yet there is something that we can do now for her and for ourselves before our silence turns us from spectators into passive accomplices. We can remember her.”
“At home, I love reaching out into that absolute silence, when you can hear the owl or the wind.”
“Independent media can go to where the silence is and break the sound barrier, doing what the corporate networks refuse to do.”
“Silence is the wit of fools.”
“One of the greatest sounds of them all – and to me it is a sound – is utter, complete silence.”
“Even in the most beautiful music there are some silences, which are there so we can witness the importance of silence.”
“When Patrick finally broke his silence with 2008’s ‘Anthems For the Damned’ – the first Filter album that he recorded sober – fans were decidedly lukewarm.”
“Depression is so exhausting – it takes up so much of your time and energy – and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.”
“David and I were divorced in 1980, and there has been silence between us ever since. Despite our decade of marriage and a child together, I was airbrushed out of his life. He never demonstrated any affection or gratitude after we parted. He fired anyone who mentioned my name.”
“The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.”
“I’ve held my silence when I probably shouldn’t have. But I was in the minority, a woman writing SF, and I was afraid of career backlash. I was afraid of being excluded or losing opportunities if I didn’t play nice.”
“Sit with silence a lot – real silence, where nothing is happening – because you learn so much in those moments of quiet.”
“Applause, it’s very nice, of course. But when you’re giving, and creating, and then there is the silence of everyone sitting there, listening, waiting, that is great.”
“If you don’t die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel music, or Neil Young.”
“I’m very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren’t talking on stage. I’m interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.”
“No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.”
“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.”
“As one of a handful of religion professors in the U.S. who study, write, and teach about conservative Christianity and politics, I am all too aware of the real meaning of the list and of its purpose. Promoted by Turning Point USA, the list is not simply designed to expose professors who discriminate; it is designed to silence and smear.”
“These things will destroy the human race: politics without principle, progress without compassion, wealth without work, learning without silence, religion without fearlessness and worship without awareness.”
“We know no one is perfect, but what we cannot tolerate, what we will never accept, is a person or company that knows dangers exists and says nothing – literally, silence can kill.”
“The Pentagon Papers case stands today as a barrier to silence by official edict.”
“In a relationship when things are really great you don’t need to say anything and just enjoy the other person. Sometimes with a couple, it gets dark and you don’t know what to say and that silence can last all day. Other times you don’t want to stop talking because you don’t want to lose one another.”
“Maybe silence is something we’re uncomfortable with as a culture, I don’t know.”
“You need not wonder at my knowing all human languages; for, to tell you the truth, I also understand all the secrets of human silence.”
“Once you permit those who are convinced of their own superior rightness to censor and silence and suppress those who hold contrary opinions, just at that moment the citadel has been surrendered.”
“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
“I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. You’ve been thrown into exile to die, really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, ‘I will not be silenced.’”
“Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.”
“Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God.”
“I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.”
“Your silence will not protect you.”
“No man pleases by silence; many I please by speaking briefly.”
“In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.”
“I like silence. Aesthetically, I feel strangled by the fast cutting and a wall of sound. And I think showing black people thinking onscreen is radical.”
“People ask me if I have some kind of death wish, to keep saying the things I do. The answer is no: I would like to keep living. However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”
“I had absolute freedom to create things on my own and in silence. No rush, the artificial rush by media. Certainly no rush to grow up. We had plenty of boyhood, plenty of girlhood.”
“On the rare occasions I go to the gym, I prefer silence.”
“In the right circumstances, I’m a big fan of eating alone. Often, on a Sunday evening, I go to a yoga class whose charm is largely that it gives me an alibi to avoid cooking family supper for once. I return to have boiled eggs and soldiers in silence with a book. Bliss.”
“There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that’s not going to be very helpful for us in the long run, in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to, you know, the bullies.”
“I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.”
“Personally, I think people need to get over this ‘being offended’ thing. Being offended does not give you the right to silence people. I get offended by things all the time – it’s just part of life. The right not to be offended is not a human right, especially in a democracy.”
“I’m not a ‘suffer in silence’ type; I’m a ‘let’s throw money at the problem’ type – I’ve done reflexology, reiki, psychotherapy, counselling. I’ve never actually had analysis, but I’d like to try that sometime.”
“In Kazahkstan, you would drive five hours outside the city to where roads sort of stop being roads, and it was just in the mountains and deathly quiet. And you could only really hear the clumping of the horses, and it was a sort of a beautiful silence. Like it enveloped you.”
“Silence is the mother of truth.”
“As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.”
“The silence of a room when someone enters with a gun is very different from the sound that room makes when empty.”
“Silence is absorption, and when you’re watching a film and you’re that quiet and you’re that still, at least from my experience of watching films, that indicates an absorption, where you’re really in the moment. You’re really present. What you’re seeing is vital to you in that moment, and it’s tingling, and it’s alive, and it matters.”
“I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn’t talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.”
“I’m going to get a pair of wire-snips, and I’ve also started a new campaign to have blank CDs on jukeboxes so you can play the silence.”
“I learned snails don’t have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.”
“Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry’s expressiveness.”
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
“For far too long the American public and business sector have kept their silence as civil liberties have been whittled away by statutory and regulatory measures.”
“As a life-long liberal who has engaged in protests against the government and for civil rights, I am saddened at efforts by some of my fellow liberals to silence commencement speakers with whom they might disagree on some issues.”
“Silence is not only golden, it is seldom misquoted.”
“Jack Benny was, without a doubt, the bravest comedian I have ever seen work. He wasn’t afraid of silence. He would take as long as it took to tell the story.”
“After my wife and I were married, we obtained a rescue dog from a family that didn’t want her anymore. She was a beautiful Collie/Shepherd mix named ‘Precious.’ It then came to pass that our first marital ‘debate’ was whether we should change the dog’s name away from the same name used by the wacky villain in ‘Silence of the Lambs.’”
“We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.”
“There’s a lot of SEALs who hate me and claim I’ve broken our code of silence.”
“I love silence.”
“As Israel prepares to enter, my position is well known. It is one that I have taken at previous Olympics. It is wrong that the IOC refuses to have a minute’s silence for Israeli athletes that were slaughtered in Munich.”
“Silence may be golden, but can you think of a better way to entertain someone than to listen to him?”
“When you’re comfortable with someone you love, the silence is the best. And, that’s how me and J. are. When we’re in a room together, we don’t have to say anything. It’s for real.”
“It’s kind of like Silence of the lambs meets Boogey Nights.”
“When friends and lovers die and your world gets quieter; that’s when the silence comes closer; that’s when next isn’t the least bit theoretical or abstract.”
“Did Anthony Hopkins really have to be a serial killer to be in ‘Silence of the Lambs?,’ I don’t think so, no. It’s called acting, people.”
“You can never get silence anywhere nowadays, have you noticed?”
“I think one of the things that was a huge surprise to everyone with ‘Silence of the Lambs’ was that that was an Oscar-winning horror movie. It struck such a nerve with audiences that it was a very particular, special experience.”
“Silence is the sure sign that you’re on your way out in Hollywood.”
“It never occurred to me that I was important enough to have some politician go out of his way to silence me. I only found out about it in the ’80s by accident – a broadcaster announced they received letters of commendation from the White House for having suppressed my music. My career was so highly impacted in the U.S. it will never recover.”
“Unfortunately, I have been a little disappointed that we have issues out there like traditional marriage, abortion, school education, and we have so much silence from the black community, from black preachers, because they understand first hand the impact of all that.”
“You haven’t partied until you’ve partied at dawn in complete silence with Buddhist monks.”
“I like peace and solitude and silence.”
“I saw my parents as model grown-ups, and their manner, their silence, informed my sense of what adulthood looked and felt like. Grown-ups behaved rationally and calmly. Grown-ups worked during the day and came home at night and sat down for drinks and passed the evening quietly.”
“Spend as much time as you can in silence. Look at the way the sun paints the ground gold.”
“Grave silence is far more powerful than the same old voices yapping away.”
“I do sing a bit, a solo called ‘Rubies,’ and the female vocals on ‘In Paradisum,’ ‘The Sound of Silence,’ and ‘Sapphire Clouds’.”
“I’m not frightened of a bit of silence.”
“Decide where and when you want to write. I like space, and silence is an inspiration to me.”
“Some people can’t stand being alone. I love solitude and silence. But when I come out of it, I’m a regular talking machine. It’s all or nothing for me.”
“Silence is sometimes the severest criticism.”
“Silence is foolish if we are wise, but wise if we are foolish.”
“Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.”
“I couldn’t imagine a day without music. It relaxes and stimulates me in equal measure and I hate the sound of silence – the concept, I mean, not the track by Simon and Garfunkel.”
“People are dying to tell you their secrets; it’s just a matter of getting the conversation going in the right direction. If you just let people fill the silence, they will let you the most extraordinary things. I sometimes wonder if afterward they remember what they’ve said.”
“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”
“Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.”
“When a monk takes a vow of silence, is he still allowed to post messages on the Internet? Chances are God won’t find out. Being ancient, God probably can’t work computers. He holds the mouse gingerly, like it’s made of fine china.”
“The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.”
“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”
“Silence is argument carried out by other means.”
“I write best late at night, when everyone in the house has gone to bed. There’s something magical about that late night silence that appeals to me.”
“I need complete silence when I write.”
“Comedy club audiences pay up to $25 per person and another fistful of cash to cover a two-drink minimum, so when they don’t like something, they let you know – with silence.”
“With comedy, it’s a combination of knowing the comedic beat was good – it made you laugh, it made people on the crew laugh. With drama, you do something deep and if your stuff was really effective, the ultimate result is silence. Silence is not necessarily… that would also be the result if you sucked.”
“When political leaders fail to denounce anti-Semitic violence and slurs, the void is not only demoralizing to the victims, but silence actually enables the wrongdoing. Silence by elected officials in particular conveys approval – or at least acquiescence – and can contribute to a climate of fear and a sense of vulnerability.”
“Silence is more musical than any song.”
“In theater, what I loved were wordless plays and working in silence.”
“With Citizens United, the Supreme Court’s declaration that corporations are people, the whims of one can silence the voices of millions.”
“The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.”
“The one source of criticism even the most repressive authoritarian leader cannot silence is the outside world. Autocrats are usually thin-skinned and like to be admired, so at least, at first, they often seek to be praised abroad.”
“To be honest, I hate silence.”
“My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.”
“Music is the silence between the notes.”
“Silence is the residue of fear.”
“My first press tour for ‘Vikings’ was pretty overwhelming. Between all the hotels, TV shows and talking a lot, I would get done and have to sit in silence for a while. It was exhausting, and you really have to focus.”
“I’d love to go to Russia and silence that crowd and give the Russian fans something to cry about.”
“People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I’d run away.”
“Silence is a true friend who never betrays.”
“As long as we suspect female actors of being somehow complicit in their own victimization, as willing participants in their own humiliation, we shame the victim and enable the culture of silence that allows predators to act with impunity.”
“Silence is a statement that is open to gross misinterpretation.”
“I know you are going to be embarrassed. We’re all embarrassed by it, but to hide the embarrassment… silence has never protected women or helped them. We need to talk about it more with our, you know – whoever – our friends, our family.”
“It now becomes clear why the Bush Administration has been vigorously opposing congressional hearings. The Bush Administration has been engaged in a conspiracy of silence.”
“Ever since I came to Congress in 1992, there are those who have been trying to silence my voice. I’ve been told to ‘sit down and shut up’ over and over again. Well, I won’t sit down and I won’t shut up until the full and unvarnished truth is placed before the American people.”
“I don’t like to read contemporary fiction while writing – I need a sense of isolation, a kind of silence, and I don’t want a jumble of other people’s voices or visions getting in my way. Nineteenth-century voices don’t create static in that silence.”
“Silence, you know, is the best place to get close to spirit for me.”
“I once went on a date where the girl drove and so couldn’t drink. I was nervous, so drank quite a bit – it didn’t end amazingly. As much as I love movies, I think cinema dates can be weird because you essentially sit next to each other in silence for a couple of hours.”
“People are never quiet. It’s go, go, go. I’m a go-getter, but you need rest and silence, just to sit around and think about things.”
“In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.”
“There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.”
“We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.”
“I’ve got a quiet voice. I think it’s because as a child I didn’t speak very much. I used to put my fingers in my ears to feel the silence, which was like a lovely trickling motion in my head.”
“I have music on when I write. I don’t like the isolation otherwise and find the silence deadening.”
“Certain songs like ‘Enjoy the Silence’ – to me, it always fits anywhere. There’s something about that song that’s really timeless, and I never get bored or feel like I have to muster something up.”
“I’m familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation.”
“I believe the regressive Left – the group of people who use illiberal tactics to silence those defending liberal principles – to be the Left’s version of the Tea Party.”
“The ‘Burials’ title really speaks to all the different levels that are on the record. It speaks to silence and panic and anxiety and loss of self and isolation and those different levels of hiding.”
“Even though there is obviously a marked stylistic difference between the majority of our catalog and a cover like ‘The Sound Of Silence,’ it certainly isn’t the first time we’ve done an acoustic track.”
“’The Sound Of Silence’ taught us that we shouldn’t be afraid of pushing the boundaries.”
“Every interaction with another person involves a dance of expectation, even when you’re just passing someone in the street. Inside those moments – however brief they may be – there is a kind of anticipatory silence.”
“All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone – and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.”
“For those of us who aren’t great with people, we figure that silence is always the safest bet. If you’re an introvert, you spend so much of your time wishing that other people would just shut the hell up that you figure you’re doing everyone a favor.”
“I think of protest as confrontation and disruption, as the end of silence.”
“It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.”
“I like to sit in my backyard. I go out on the hammock and sit in silence and kind of meditate. Nature is calming, and it’s nice to go out there and clear my head.”
“I work late at night. I’m awake and nobody bothers me. It’s quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.”
“I would head to the countryside for peace and silence. That would be the best way, away from panicked, hysterical people.”
“After The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, the audience would like to know where, when, and who arrests Hannibal Lecter for the first time. This is the story of Red Dragon.”
“Sometimes you don’t have to say anything. Silence speaks it all.”
“No one nor anything can silence me.”
“There is nothing quite as loud as the silence of an audience when a comedian is on stage.”
“Silence, exile, cunning and so on… it’s my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.”
“There’s a degree of deception in silence.”
“Friends die, friends become demented, friends quarrel, friends drift with old age into silence.”
“There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.”
“Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.”
“I used to be very scared of silence because I felt it was my responsibility to keep people occupied. That definitely spawns from an insecurity in myself. When people aren’t enjoying themselves, when I’m involved, it somehow comes back to it being my fault. But I do want people to have a good time.”
“Romance is a bird that will not sing in every bush, and love-affairs, however devoted the sentiments that inspire them, are often so business-like in the prudence with which they are conducted, that romance is reduced to a mere croaking or a disgusted silence.”
“If at noon you sit down and there’s just silence or blank tape, in an hour if you have a song, that didn’t exist an hour ago. Now it exists and it might exist for a long time. There’s something empowering about that.”
“The true genius shudders at incompleteness – and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be.”
“My kids have never seen me scream at anybody. They’ve never seen an argument. There’s never been even a cold silence. And those are things that I grew up with because my parents did end up divorcing.”
“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”
“Silence may be as variously shaded as speech.”
“It’s a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.”
“Less is always more. The best language is silence. We live in a time of a terrible inflation of words, and it is worse than the inflation of money.”
“To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.”
“He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.”
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
“Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.”
“I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.”
“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
“Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.”
“But the child’s sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!”
“We should not silence our nation’s researchers.”
“Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.”
“To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of men.”
“The serious questions that are talked out or strangled with red tape are more numerous than those that are killed by silence; the number of people whose ideas are knocked on the head in societies is greater in our day than that of the solitary fighters who go under.”
“Books are such quiet things – created in silence, read in silence – yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I’ve been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.”
“I like silence.”
“Sometimes I wish that applause would come just a bit later, when it is so beautifully hushed that I feel like holding my breath in the silence of the end.”
“Speech and silence. We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.”
“A sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.”
“It’s impossible to put a video online without hoards of anonymous men picking apart your appearance or saying especially cruel things. It works to silence women who shouldn’t be scared of sharing their opinions with others.”
“I think so, Silence of the Lambs was a great, suspenseful thriller and I would expect Red Dragon to be similar. And I think it’s very character driven.”
“If I cannot understand my friend’s silence, I will never get to understand his words.”
“While silence can in some circumstances bespeak noble self-control, it can also signify suppression, oblivion or cowardice.”
“Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.”
“Silence is safer than speech.”
“From the right, you get demagogues shouting about brown-skinned anchor babies and clamoring to deport the undocumented. From the left, you get advocacy for the oppressed but otherwise, when it comes to national civic identity, mainly silence.”
“I like working in silence.”
“When I’m sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it’s silence and despair! It’s not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.”
“Silence is true wisdom’s best reply.”
“True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.”
“Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.”
“A leader who cobbles together his self-esteem by attempting to silence or libel his critics and by amplifying his echo chamber is a dangerous one indeed.”
“I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?”
“With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.”
“Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.”
“I aspire only to silence.”
“People think we are such great talkers, but there is so much silence in Ireland about certain issues.”
“’The Silence of the Lambs’ is my favourite book, favourite film.”
“Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.”
“Silence is the virtue of fools.”
“It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.”
“I don’t listen to music when designing. We create in silence. I go through a torturous process because everything has to be precise and right.”
“Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.”
“My hope and prayer is that the body of Christ in America will awake with holy boldness, a boldness content neither with silence nor mere words but that backs up those words with action and results.”
“Best said possibly the only thing that would have changed my attitude: ‘What will happen to me?’ ‘Your friend MacLeod will look after you,’ I said. Best replied, ‘If you get out, I get out.’ There was silence for some moments. I thought of all the joy of the early experiments which we had known together. Here was loyalty.”
“Great souls suffer in silence.”
“I’ve always felt that the truth is in the silence.”
“It’s a very strange silence that I’m living in right now. It’s a silence that has a lot of activity and noise in it from a zone that I don’t live in on this earth.”
“I enjoy playing characters where the silence is loud.”
“Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.”
“I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.”
“Pittsburgh, for a while, became a production centre. There was one $400 million year. Hollywood was bringing productions in there. Films like ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘Innocent Blood.’ So my guys, the guys I worked with, were able to have careers and live at home. But then it dried up, and a lot of my friends left.”
“Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”
“Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.”
“I have seen him set fire to his wigwam and smooth over the graves of his fathers… clap his hand in silence over his mouth, and take the last look over his fair hunting ground, and turn his face in sadness to the setting sun.”
“If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”
“Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.”
“Speech is the small change of silence.”
“For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.”
“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
“Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.”
“And in the afternoon they entered a land – but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.”
“Instead of fostering the kind of dialogue in the boardroom that has in part contributed to our success, the board has inappropriately chosen to silence my concerns through termination as an executive officer.”
“Sometimes, the players who are not spoken about a lot, they grow and get better – with silence.”
“There are three reasons why I live in Scotland. First, I like silence, and you have to be a millionaire to buy silence in Italy. Second, I like cold weather. Third, in Italy I have too many relatives and know too many people, so I never get a quiet time.”
“I love to read, and I like the fact that there’s some silence in my life.”
“He knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.”
“As an immigrant, I appreciate, far more than the average American, the liberties we have in this country. Silence is a big enemy of morality. I don’t want our blunders in history to get repeated.”
“I’ve had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody’s fault but mine.”
“Some things we must pass over in silence.”
“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.”
“Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.”
“Silence is my dignity.”
“Silence is the most powerful state.”
“Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
“Everything in life is speaking in spite of it’s apparent silence.”
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”
“It’s time for women to make their voices heard. Their silence on the subject of war and peace is deafening.”
“Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.”
“Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.”
“In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.”
“Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.”
“It was still quiet in the house, and not a sound was heard from outside, either. Were it not for this silence, my reverie would probably have been disrupted by reminders of daily duties, of getting up and going to school.”
“Turgenev’s achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy.”
“In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to ‘disappear’ my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out.”
“When a dictatorship imprisons someone or makes them disappear, it’s actually a very strategic move. We forget that. It’s not as senseless as it seems. It’s a way to silence someone, but also it’s a way to silence their family as well, out of fear, and society by extension.”
“Every time I criticize the anti-Zionists, they say, ‘You are trying to silence us.’ I don’t deny there are some people who are critical of Israel who are not anti-Semitic. But to criticize Israel, and then criticize Zionism, is not quite the same thing.”
“If I’m walking down the street, and if a person abuses me, the dignified thing to do is to keep walking, but if that person starts throwing stones into my home and affects the well-being of me and my family, then that silence is no longer strength; that silence becomes weakness.”
“Silence on the part of public officials at the national level only serves to empower Islamophobes.”
“I suffer from low self-esteem. I had horrible self-esteem growing up. You really have to save yourself because the critic within you will eat you up. It’s not the outside world – it’s your interior life, that critic within you, that you have to silence.”
“There hasn’t been anyone with whom I can discuss my scripts. Even when the film is done, there is no one I can show it to who gives his sincere opinion. There is silence.”
“In radio, you have two tools. Sound and silence.”
“’True Detective’ was the last show I got crazy about, with its ‘Silence of the Lambs’-style landscape and those strip mall badlands of America.”
“Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad.”
“The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds.”
“When people are uncomfortable – and many people are when they have to negotiate – they start rambling as a way to fill the vacuum of silence. Some of the strongest negotiators I know just sit back and listen. The less they engage, the more likely the other person is to slip up and offer information they otherwise would have kept guarded.”
“Some comics have long routines to get them in the mood – I just prefer to sit down, write out the same jokes in a different order and then have a little prayer that I won’t be met by silence.”
“I’ve actually enjoyed pitching on the road in the postseason. You go out there, and you’re getting booed, and it’s fun to try to silence the crowd.”
“Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.”
“In 2004, Lawrence Wright wrote in the ‘New Yorker’ about ‘The Kingdom of Silence,’ where a massive sewer project in Jeddah was really a series of manhole covers across the city with no actual pipes underneath. I, as the editor of a major paper at the time, can say that we all knew – and we never reported on it.”
“Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.”
“When holiness is achieved by conforming to God’s will, one knows intuitively that which is wrong and that which is right before the Lord. Holiness speaks when there is silence, encouraging that which is good or reproving that which is wrong.”
“What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.”
“I think I should have made ‘Dead Silence’ as an independent movie.”
“From politics, it was an easy step to silence.”
“If we don’t bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.”
“When you work for DC, it’s sort of like working for the CIA. You have a vow of silence.”
“People feel really uncomfortable when there’s silence.”
“Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.”
“The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.”
“Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.”
“Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.”
“Love is not a fire to be shut up in a soul. Everything betrays us: voice, silence, eyes; half-covered fires burn all the brighter.”
“A small silence came between us, as precise as a picture hanging on the wall.”
“It has taken Thomas Harris 11 years to publish the sequel to ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ which suggests that while everyone was desperate to read it, he was not desperate to write it.”
“If you don’t have anything nice to say… dead silence creates a lot awkwardness.”
“Ever since I can remember, I hated silence. I wanted it filled with guitars and melodies to sing all day.”
“In terms of rock and roll, I’m often drawn to louder, rougher stuff; maybe that’s my history as a punk rock wannabee showing itself! Honestly, though, I’m not one of those people who listens to music constantly. I really love silence.”
“The opening of ‘There Will Be Blood’ with that score and then deafening silence was memorable.”
“Democrats know ‘racism’ doesn’t exist, but they use it to silence white conservatives and to instill fear in blacks and motivate them to vote.”
“The Left wants to silence conservative Christians in the media and in the political square.”
“Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.”
“Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching, you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence.”
“It’s one of the most basic laws of human nature, isn’t it? The more we are denied something, the more we want it. The more silence given to this or that topic, the more power.”
“Silence is not what democracy needs. Right now we have an election where, even the supporters of Hillary Clinton, the majority don’t support Hillary; they just oppose Donald Trump. And the majority of Donald Trump supporters don’t support him; they just oppose Hillary.”
“We want the game to be attractive to a new audience, but you have to be careful because there are certain traditions this game upholds. Silence over the swing, that’s always been there. That’s not understood by those who don’t play golf.”
“A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.”
“Going across the Tannai Desert was one of the spookiest experiences I’ve ever had. Not driving during the day; that was fine. And so we camped in an old sort of truck siding, I think. And the silence. The eerie silence and then a dingo howling, and it was just so spooky. I didn’t sleep all night.”
“What I am looking for… is an immobile movement, something which would be the equivalent of what is called the eloquence of silence, or what St. John of the Cross, I think it was, described with the term ‘mute music’.”
“New-Year’s Day arriving, and the ministers, to whom I wrote, remaining silent, I consider their silence as evidence, that they cannot prove what I said not to be from the Lord, and have therefore published as I was directed.”
“’Silence Of The Lambs’ was not something people expected me to do.”
“One of the things I’ve always enjoyed is moving around and staying fit. Physicality is such a big part of being an actor, but it’s also about stillness and silence.”
“I like to have space between the notes. I like to use silence.”
“Silence can be very effective, and it gives the music space to breathe.”
“In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!”
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.”
“Silence marks time, saturates and shapes African-American art. Silences structure our music, fill the spaces – point, counterpoint – of rhythm, cadence, phrasing.”
“I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.”
“Ultimately when I gave up the use of motorized vehicles, I walked everywhere, from town to town, across states and two continents. When I stopped talking, I mean literally I stopped speaking. I took a complete vow of silence.”
“Silence is best.”
“You can’t lose your concentration at all. And there are times when you’re on the stage, and you’ve got silence, which is wonderful, but you have to have the confidence to make you realize it’s fine. You can’t suddenly wobble and think, ‘They’re not interested.’”
“Thinking fascinates me, and I probably spend too much time in my mind. My wife says that my perfect world is to be in the Suburban driving, with her next to me and the boys in the back seat and complete silence for two thousand miles.”
“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”
“A good word is an easy obligation; but not to speak ill requires only our silence, which costs us nothing.”
“I think the truest things come from silence, but everything’s always so clogged up with noise. If everything falls away, and you can truly listen to someone, giving them yourself and generosity, you can truly lose yourself in what they’re saying. Like, not impose your ideas on what they’re saying, but really tune into them.”
“By the time I got to ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ I was madly in love with close-ups because I’m madly in love with actors, and a basic premise of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is the story about two people fighting their way into each other’s heads.”
“When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!”
“I’ll tell you – what I can tell you is that I know when I saw ‘Zodiac’ and then again when I saw ‘No Country For Old Men,’ there was a moment in each of my viewing experiences where I went, ‘Dammit, this is scarier than ‘Silence Of The Lambs.””
“The whole Orion zeitgeist, of treating filmmakers as partners, to me it’s inseparable from the success of ‘Silence of the Lambs’.”
“And Silence of the Lambs is a really smart book.”
“If my energy was fake, then I would feel pressured, because I gotta, like, keep this up. I thank God it’s just how I am. But I find myself wanting to work on being more comfortable in the silence with people.”
“Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.”
“I can’t imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you’re facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.”
“’The Look of Silence’ is able to have a wide public release, although still not in cinemas. It’s distributed by two government bodies, the National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council.”
“To put it crudely, ‘The Act of Killing’ would blast open the space for the more delicate film, ‘The Look of Silence,’ to do its work.”
“I wanted to resist in ‘The Look of Silence’ making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.”
“You see, ‘The Look of Silence’ is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It’s normally never done because it is too dangerous.”
“I always felt that, when I saw Denzel or Viola do scenes in their past films or past projects, that if it’s a heavy scene, and it’s requiring a lot of emotional weight, that we would have nothing but silence and incense burning in between takes just to keep things quiet.”
“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.”
“I continued to protect him with my silence.”
“The silence was part of the story I wanted to tell.”
“In the silence of night I have often wished for just a few words of love from one man, rather than the applause of thousands of people.”
“You should protest about the views of people you disagree with over major moral issues, and argue them down, but you should not try to silence them, however repugnant you find them. That is the bitter pill free speech requires us to swallow.”
“Just three minutes a day of silence is a wonderful exercise to reset your ears and to recalibrate so that you can hear the quiet again. If you can’t get absolute silence, go for quiet; that’s absolutely fine.”
“People often mistake our mission at The Sound Agency for a crusade for silence, but actually, silence is in many ways just as bad as too much noise.”
“Never let anyone silence your voice.”
“The AIDS epidemic began before I was born – I’ve never known a world without it. And yet, despite its omnipresence in our lives, there remains a pervasive silence around AIDS among young people, particularly young women.”
“The most boring thing in the world? Silence.”
“I am representing here – the sound of silence. The cry of innocence. And, the face of invisibility. I represent millions of those children who are left behind, and that’s why I have kept an empty chair here as a reminder.”
“My favorite movie of all time is ‘The Silence of the Lambs.’ I think Hannibal Lecter is the scariest movie monster ever because he’s smarter than you are.”
“Most of the time, people are afraid of silence, and I’m not.”
“I like silence; I’m a gregarious loner and without the solitude, I lose my gregariousness.”
“Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.”
“But with exquisite breathing you smile, with satisfaction of love, And I touch you again as you tick in the silence and settle in sleep.”
“The better the information it has, the better democracy works. Silence and secrecy are never good for it.”
“As editor, I think we need to act more decisively on what kind of material appears on the ‘Guardian’. Those who argue that this is an affront to freedom of speech miss the point. That freedom counts for little if it is used to silence others.”
“Imams seldom condemn terror. And in their silence, in the void, acceptance – encouragement even – is assumed.”
“When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.”
“I have to make sure that I don’t silence myself about the things that I believe in, because sometimes the fear creeps in of ‘What if fewer people watch the show or fewer people hire me because I express my politics?’ For me, the commitment is to never be quiet just because I’m in the public eye.”
“I’m a guy that likes to sit in the quiet and think about things, and sometimes it’s way more relaxing to have dead silence.”
“Our shows are just like that. The screaming is constant, nonstop, and there’s not one minute of silence during the show. It’s pretty intense.”
“I love the Capitol rotunda. It’s just so big and so grand, and I love being in the Capitol at night when it’s empty, and you can go stand in the Capitol rotunda and bask in the silence of history. You can sort of imagine all of the things that have happened inside that Rotunda from presidents lying in state to other important events.”
“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.”
“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”
“I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.”
“I don’t think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.”
“There’s too many sounds in the world! The sounds of the earth are terrible! The roots squeezing and jostling one another through the clefts, and the crashing of the acorn from the oak. The cry of the little birdeen in under the silence of the hawk!”
“Never forget the power of silence, that massively disconcerting pause which goes on and on and may at last induce an opponent to babble and backtrack nervously.”
“Silence is a source of great strength.”
“I crave a cone of silence every once in while.”
“The entertainment industry is terrified of silence.”
“I am not going to stand by as people like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg silence the voices of millions of conservatives.”
“I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.”
“I once spent an entire night in a hotel in New York looking across the way into someone’s apartment where nothing was happening but daily life, a phone call, television watching, staring into the fridge. Seeing how those strangers lived over that small distance and in absolute silence moved me deeply.”
“To me, it is not necessarily you responding that trolls want: they want to scare, they want to intimidate, and they want to silence people – so ignoring it doesn’t make a difference.”
“America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.”
“I belong to a nation which over the past centuries has experienced many hardships and reverses. The world reacted with silence or with mere sympathy when Polish frontiers were crossed by invading armies and the sovereign state had to succumb to brutal force.”
“Let the veil of silence fall presently over what happened afterwards. Silence, too, can speak out.”
“My hobby is silence.”
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
“When it comes to true humility in the face of history, nothing beats complete silence.”
“For too long, our society has shrugged off bullying by labeling it a ‘rite of passage’ and by asking students to simply ‘get over it.’ Those attitudes need to change. Every day, students are bullied into silence and are afraid to speak up. Let’s break this silence and end school bullying.”
“’The Look of Silence’ was an unforgettable, chilling documentary.”
“In silence – and in self-defense – I figured things out in my own little way.”
“I don’t listen to music when I write. I need silence.”
“That’s what I love – on ‘The Farewell,’ we played with a lot of silence and a lot of negative space, and I really worked with the composer to create those juxtapositions of like, those awkward silences and when something comes in.”
“Climate change is not an excuse to silence political speech.”
“The most profound statements are often said in silence.”
“Silence is complicity. I believe that.”
“With its imagination and large sales, Apple has become the world’s most valuable IT company. However people are starting to have doubts regarding Apple’s silence on heavy metal pollution problems.”
“Many women do not want to venture out into the ‘opinion world’ until they are certain of themselves, the facts, and that they are right. They are afraid of being shot down. The result is often silence.”
“People ask me, ‘Isn’t it scary living on your own?’ but in this industry, being at events, doing interviews, and doing promotion and constantly chatting about yourself, sometimes it’s really nice to just sit in silence or take a day where you can sleep in until 3 P.M. and then stay up as late as you like.”
“To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.”
“Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.”
“In silence and movement you can show the reflection of people.”
“Silence in the turmoil of the theater world made me survive 50 years without speaking on a stage, only to say ‘No’ in Mel Brooks’ film, ‘Silent Movie.’”
“You cannot give up on the American dream. We cannot allow our fears and our disappointments to lead us into silence and into inaction.”
“We cannot allow our fears and our disappointments to lead us into silence and into inaction. Because this country that God has blessed us with, it is worth fighting for.”
“Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.”
“Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.”
“A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.”
“Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.”
“Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is – sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent.”
“Against the State, against the Church, against the silence of the medical profession, against the whole machinery of dead institutions of the past, the woman of today arises.”
“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.”
“Because music is a language unto itself, when I’m writing, I need silence. I need to hear the music and the rhythms of the words inside my thoughts.”
“There’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to contain her power and not let it leak, standing firmly within it in mystery and silence. A woman who talks too much sheds her allure.”
“The Browning love story? It is an ideal, all too rare, and yet I hardly think it strange. It would have been far stranger had the fates allowed those two brilliant passionate souls to beat themselves out in silence.”
“Silence and solitude are more distracting to me than chatter and commotion.”
“I can’t sleep without the TV on. It doesn’t matter where it is. I don’t like silence. My ears ring from loud music.”
“I give people a space to simply sit in silence and communicate with me deeply but non-verbally.”
“In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.”
“Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.”
“Silence is so accurate.”
“One of the best things about paintings is their silence – which prompts reflection and random reverie.”
“Silence is the last thing the world will ever hear from me.”
“So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.”
“When you are interviewing someone, never let your camera person turn off the camera. The second you turn off the camera, they’ll say the magic thing that you’d been looking for the whole interview. People want to relax after the performance is done. Don’t be afraid of awkward silence. That is your friend.”
“Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.”
“For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.”
“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”
“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”
“For whatever reason, some sorts of women’s silence were broken by MeToo. This is the optimistic bit. And that will lead to a much more careful attention to women’s voices.”
“We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence.”
“Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.”
“After an argument, silence may mean acceptance or the continuation of resistance by other means.”
“Being a depressive should not imply danger any more than being a man or even a human should. Mental illness isn’t a them/us issue; we are all on the scale somewhere. So we must be very careful to resist ignorance and combat the stigma that leads to dangerous silence.”
“If there’s a silence in a room I’ll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.”
“We now know that we imprint information during the day. We sort of – that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this – in the dark of night.”
“It’s a rule when you’re welcomed in the Marvel family that you have to understand that you’re going to be living in a code of silence.”
“Mr. Bergman was a man of great working discipline. He forced everyone to concentrate when it was important. No disturbing noise during rehearsal. A code of silence.”
“One of the hardiest myths in British public life is that there is a conspiracy of silence on immigration. Liberals and leftists, it is alleged, have bandied together to prevent debate or discussion of ‘mass immigration’ into the U.K., caused by Labour’s ‘open door’ policies.”
“She would sit by herself in the middle of the old stoe amphitheatre, with the sky’s starry vault overhead, and simply listen to the great silence around her.”
“Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.”
“I would like to take a moment of silence to remember all those who lost their lives at the hands of ISIS, especially Americans James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and, most recently, Kayla Mueller.”
“With a live audience, it’s very clear when you’ve pushed it too far to the edge – because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse – that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.”
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
“Silence is a universal language. It’s like music or painting.”
“I never authorized any payments for someone to be silent. I did not buy anyone’s silence.”
“Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.”
“Silence is complicity. Speak now or surrender your ground.”
“One of my biggest fears as a director is that everything is taking too long on camera. The actor saying their lines, the silence between lines, the length of time it takes to walk from A to B. So you try it at different speeds and then see what sticks in the edit room.”
“Listen to the silence. Listen to your life. Be present, not just think about what’s going on next week, next month.”
“I’m a songwriter. I need silence to hear the melodies, so I don’t fill the days with a lot of sound.”
“I came to love silence, because it’s so rare, and it’s now my favorite aural condition.”
“As women, we can over-think things so much that we silence our intuition and only focus on the reasons something won’t work.”
“I don’t listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.”
“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
“Silence is golden when you can’t think of a good answer.”
“Silence and reserve will give anyone a reputation for wisdom.”
“Once I was condemned to three months’ absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.”
“Women need space and silence. We too quickly give away our energy. There’s something about holding that richness.”
“My social media is riddled with me speaking out on stuff that matters because silence is a petri dish for hate. For me, it’s important to speak out.”
“A lot of black men get in desperate situations because they don’t see any other avenues to make it. You make a couple of mistakes today, that’s all she wrote. You’re not going to get a good job; nobody’s gonna hire a felon. You can’t even vote. They just want to silence you.”
“We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing ‘Kumbaya’. We don’t really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.”
“As someone who spent a lot of years living in Jerusalem, one of the great perks is that when you come back, and you get into these Israel arguments in your American-Jewish clan, you can really just silence them by saying, ‘I lived there.’ So we used it like a bludgeon.”
“The entertainment industry isn’t a line of work encouraged in the Persian culture. When I called my dad to say I wanted to quit medicine, there was about three minutes of silence. I’m not sure he knew what to do with himself!”
“What a mysterious thing madness is. I have watched patients whose lips are forever sealed in a perpetual silence. They live, breathe, eat; the human form is there, but that something, which the body can live without, but which cannot exist without the body, was missing.”
“The news media’s silence, particularly television news, is reprehensible. If we knew as much about Darfur as we do about Michael Jackson, we might be able to stop these things from continuing.”
“I believe silence is the greatest sound of all.”
“I’ve always worked a lot with silence in my films. It forces the audience to concentrate on what they’re seeing, because silence is pure emotions. It has no logic; it goes straight to the heart.”
“To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.”
“I worked for Sarah Palin. I have the political staffer version of P.T.S.D., so whenever I hear that she’s breaking her silence, my heart stops.”
“Mormonism was born amid secrecy, and throughout its existence as a religion it has sustained a close yet complex relationship to the arts of silence.”
“I would have loved to have been in the room with the ABC executives when they watched David Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ TV pilot. You know that had to be a long silence after that thing stopped.”
“Those who had demanded no more than an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a commitment to negotiations saw their demands being realized, and lapsed into silence.”
“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.”
“I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.”
“Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.”
“A man is known by the silence he keeps.”
“I believe with a lot of support shows, people are very much there to see the headliner. You don’t necessarily have their full attention, and some of what we do requires a lot of silence.”
“I like the muted sounds, the shroud of grey, and the silence that comes with fog.”
“I readily concede that a prime minister is not required to speak on every occasion or on every subject, but when there is a duty to speak, silence is unacceptable. Silence can be a strategy, silence can be a tactic, but silence can never be an answer to the ills of our polity and the fault lines of our society.”
“Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.”
“I watched the first moon landing at a bar in Paducah, Kentucky, a fact worth mentioning only because I still remember how suddenly silence descended on this raucous place when Neil Armstrong started coming down that ladder.”
“Introspection, or ‘sitting in the silence,’ is an unscientific way of trying to force apart the mind and senses, tied together by the life force. The contemplative mind, attempting its return to divinity, is constantly dragged back toward the senses by the life currents.”
“Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness. Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.”
“If somebody wants to go to church because they like the ritual of it and want to sit in silence for a while one time a week, then that’s great. If someone wants to go because they believe that God them and Jesus rose after three days, then that’s great, too.”
“There are times when I have to take, I call it a ‘silence bath,’ where I shut off all of the external gadgets. I go walk around, talk to people, and just live life for a while.”
“As you get older as a comedian and keep doing it, what you actually start to cherish on stage is not the build-up to the jokes, but how comfortable you can be in the silence and the non-laughing parts, and how long you can take the audience without a laugh to then get a huge reaction.”
“There’s a bunch of Stephen King books I love. ‘Salem’s Lot’ was always one of my favourites. ‘It.’ ‘Needful Things.’ Moving away from King, and ‘Silence of the Lambs’ is always a good choice.”
“It appears that the Obama Administration is attempting to silence public comments and once again pander to extremist mining opponents seeking to undermine a bipartisan jobs bill that is estimated to create approximately 3,700 new jobs and generate $60 billion dollars for our economy.”
“As an artist I come to sing, but as a citizen, I will always speak for peace, and no one can silence me in this.”
“Listen to the sound of silence.”
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenements halls and whispered in the sounds of silence.”
“One of the greatest attacks of the enemy is to make you busy, to make you hurried, to make you noisy, to make you distracted, to fill the people of God and the Church of God with so much noise and activity that there is no room for prayer. There is no room for being alone with God. There is no room for silence. There is no room for meditation.”
“Costa Rica and Germany have simply been pawns in the Japanese quest to silence Sea Shepherd in an attempt to stop our annual opposition of their illegal whaling activities.”
“CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.”
“My idea of fun is to sit looking at a blank wall in a cottage, making up stories in utter silence. The thought of going back to work in an office is horrendous.”
“The silence caused by politicizing speech is deafening.”
“’London’ is a gallery of sensation of impressions. It is a history of London in a thematic rather than a chronological sense with chapters of the history of smells, the history of silence, and the history of light. I have described the book as a labyrinth, and in that sense in complements my description of London itself.”
“The only way to silence a room that’s laughing at you is to sort of take over.”
“For that reason you can’t write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you’re writing, and for that you need silence.”
“We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
“I love going to London for a couple of days but I need to be in the country. I like the silence, the smell and the seasonal changes, especially in spring and summer. I really feel that I belong there.”
“I love snowboarding. It’s probably my favorite sport. I love sitting on top of the mountain and the snow falling and that silence, that snow silence. That’s, like, a very peaceful, happy place for me.”
“A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.”
“Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.”
“The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.”
“Not every truth is the better for showing its face undisguised; and often silence is the wisest thing for a man to heed.”
“To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.”
“Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.”
“There are people and nations, Mother, that I would like to say to you by name. I entrust them to you in silence, I entrust them to you in the way that you know best.”
“History has always judged silence and complicity harshly in these times of moral consequence.”
“Silence is better than unmeaning words.”
“It is better wither to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.”
“The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.”
“I’m a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I’m happy that way.”
“I’ve seen ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ like, fifty or sixty times. That’s my favorite movie of all time.”
“Millions of children all over the world live in silence and face communication barriers – and, particularly, access to education.”
“Silence is deeply woven into the fabric of female experience.”
“What I do want is to be transparent about where I am and how I got here. I don’t like the cone of silence – it didn’t do me any favors in my 20s or 30s, and I don’t see it doing much for other women, either.”
“Silence is also conversation.”
“Silence is ever speaking; it is the perennial flow of language.”
“Silence can be a very powerful tool. Sometimes it’s more powerful to leave you with nothing.”
“There is a lot of silence in me, and I feel that silence is often better than spoken words.”
“Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.”
“I love a player who can go on the road and silence a crowd.”
“There are few places you can find silence. Air travel could be the last fortress of solitude.”
“Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the ‘withdrawal relationship’ that links him with his Father… To listen to the Father’s silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.”
“On September 11, people were shaken, but they quickly calmed down. There was a flash of awareness, which lasted a few fractions of a second. People could feel that something was happening. Then a blanket of silence covered up the crack in our certainty of safety.”
“Enjoying art is a personal matter. It’s made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.”
“A touring comic’s typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.”
“We win with facts that are well expressed and frequently communicated; we lose with silence and indifference to the broader social context.”
“A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn’t considered pathological, we are outside of time.”
“These years in silence and reflection made me stronger and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within and that this kind of truth gives me the power to conquer emotions I didn’t even know existed.”
“No one should ever suffer in silence. Bullies thrive in silence.”
“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”
“The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.”
“Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.”
“And new people come in, and it doesn’t go along with their politics, and they fire me, end the column, silence a voice in Los Angeles. They can’t silence it nationally, but they are able to do it there.”
“At the time, acid made me consider questions of reality, the difference, as someone said, between words and silence. It also brought back a lot of latent religious feelings in me that I had turned my back on.”
“I start any work the same way. I start a rehearsal with silence.”
“In the courtroom of science, if you have the facts on your side, you don’t need a gun – and juries would be well advised to distrust the case of those parties who choose to use weapons to silence adversarial witnesses.”
“White fragility doesn’t always manifest in overt ways; silence and withdrawal are also functions of fragility.”
“There was scarcely a month during 1988 when Thomas Harris’ novel, ‘The Silence Of The Lambs,’ was not on or around the top of the ‘New York Times’ list of America’s bestselling books.”
“When federal agents and prosecutors quietly open a criminal investigation, we are not concealing anything; we are simply following the longstanding policy that we refrain from publicizing non-public information. In that context, silence is not concealment.”
“Sometimes, as a former football player, we have to go into that away game and silence the crowd. And just let them know I am the man. I’m going to be here for a long time.”
“Since 1994, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have considered it politically risky to offer a plan to fix America’s broken health care system. The American public, though, has paid the price for this silence as health care costs skyrocketed, millions went uninsured, and millions more grappled with financial insecurity and hardship.”
“Many old music hall fans were present at the funeral today of Fred ‘Chuckles’ Jenkins, Britain’s oldest and unfunniest comedian. In tribute, the vicar read out one of Fred’s jokes, and the congregation had two minutes silence.”
“Under the leaden sway of Alexander III’s government, the silence of the graveyard prevailed. Russian society, equally discouraged by the collapse of all hopes for peaceful reforms and by the apparent ineffectiveness of the revolutionary movement, was in the grip of a mood of depression and resignation.”
“Internet outrage can seem mindless, but it rarely is. To make that assumption is dismissive. There’s something beneath the outrage – an unwillingness to be silent in the face of ignorance, hatred or injustice. Outrage may not always be productive, but it is far better than silence.”
“I don’t mind being distracted. I don’t want to sit there in utter silence and type. If the phone rings, I usually answer it, speak for a few minutes and return to writing, or go for a walk in and out of the rooms. I don’t mind a break.”
“People can say what they want. But you can silence a lot of people when you go out there and win.”
“In some causes silence is dangerous.”
“First and foremost, the monk should own nothing in this world, but he should have as his possessions solitude of the body, modesty of bearing, a modulated tone of voice, and a well-ordered manner of speech. He should be without anxiety as to his food and drink, and should eat in silence.”
“There’s something about the silence of people listening to someone or watching someone – I just… I love that.”
“Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.”
“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
“Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile… a stain upon the silence.”
“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
“It is tact that is golden, not silence.”
“Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.”
“I have always said that the debate about who should play in goal is part of the game, but I never play in order to silence anyone.”
“You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.”
“If you spend enough time with yourself in silence, you’ll be surprised what goes through your head.”
“I don’t think we spend enough time in silence, just realizing what’s floating around in our noggin.”
“A moment of silence is not inherently religious.”
“Because we spoke so loudly, opponents of reproductive health access demonized and smeared me and others on the public airwaves. These smears are obvious attempts to distract from meaningful policy discussions and to silence women’s voices regarding their own health care.”
“The job of the press is to speak truth to power. And yet, for doing our job, we are persecuted. I say that these aggressive and illegal tactics to silence us – inventing arbitrary legal interpretations, over-zealous charges and disproportionate sentences – must not be permitted to succeed.”
“I have to have music on when writing, or else the silence swallows me whole.”
“As Paretsky detailed in her short memoir Writing in an Age of Silence (2007), early optimism buoyed by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and early 1970s has, in her view, all but crumbled in the face of a bombardment of sadism and misogyny, the withholding of civil liberties, and the nation’s move from proud speech into near-deafening silence.”
“Much talking is the cause of danger. Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely about.”
“The music aids the message, it’s there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence.”
“I think there’s a great deal of information you can convey with looks or silence.”
“With others, I feel betrayed that those who had the authority in the Church to stop Brendan Smyth failed to act on the evidence I gave them. However, I also accept that I was part of an unhelpful culture of deference and silence in society and the Church, which thankfully is now a thing of the past.”
“My liberal friends, Congressional Black Caucus members, talk about fighting for the defenseless, the hopeless, and the downtrodden. There is no one more hopeless and voiceless than an unborn baby, but their silence is deafening. I can’t hear them. Where are they standing up for their communities, advocating and fighting for their right to life?”
“I give a facial expression in a moment of silence for audiences to react to what I just said and kind of let that marinate with the audience for a little bit. I enjoy the physical part of the comedy as much as the verbal content. People tend to gravitate to not only what they’re hearing but also what they’re seeing.”
“Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.”
“The Chinese government has been clear in its goal and purpose for creating and expanding Confucius Institutes throughout the country, namely to distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.”
“The thing to keep in mind is that we’re still in the very early days when it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Saying there’s a silence is a bit like if Columbus, looking to discover a new continent, only sailed 10 miles off the coast of Spain before turning back to say, ‘Nothing out there!’”
“#MeToo shows this bias is systemic, that people get away with violence against women, get away with discrimination – whether in work or society in general – because, for too long, silence has been the answer.”
“Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve hit them where they live.”
“In my own life, I had gone from Maryland State Honors Chorus and writing and singing my own songs to a musical silence. It seemed the busier my work life would get, the less I had to feed the other parts of my own soul, including the arts.”
“To silence criticism is to silence freedom.”
“I learned to hear silence. That’s the kind of life I lived: simple. I learned to see things in people around me, in my mom, dad, brothers and sisters.”
“To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.”
“Silence, this will surprise you not, isn’t really a Jewish concept.”
“The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.”
“I work in silence.”
“Silence is an ornament for women.”
“Don’t you know that silence supports the accuser’s charge?”
“To kill, in war or in any circumstance, creates a silence. It is right that silence should surround the taking of life. After all, the life taken is not ours to take.”
“I definitely have to make sure I have my Jamaican playlist whenever I go, and you’ve gotta listen to Popcaan. I really love his song ‘Silence,’ but the whole album, ‘Forever,’ is good. I love his melodies and flows. He just knows how to make good songs.”
“Out of silence is born concentration, and from that comes learning.”
“Silence is the necessary soil for any thought to flourish.”
“I don’t listen to music a lot in that I rarely sit down and put on a CD because I really want to treasure the silence that is there when I’m not practising. But when I listen to a piece, I listen to it often.”
“We took our Catholicism very seriously. We never missed Mass; our father was a lector, and both our parents taught catechism. At 3 in the afternoon on Good Friday, we gathered in the living room for 10 minutes of silence in front of a painting of the Crucifixion.”
“’Silence Kid’ starts with a broken classic-rock intro. It’s funny to hear us do that. Obviously, we weren’t skillful rock stars. Then it’s spinning through a lot of hooks really fast, and all of a sudden, it’s over.”
“If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don’t know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence. But with comedy it’s a simple premise. If it’s funny, people laugh. If it’s not, they don’t.”
“If you are a great dramatic actor then you often don’t know if people are enjoying your stuff at all because they are sitting there in silence.”
“Being on a comedy tour is like traveling with family, everyone is all having a great time… then all of a sudden it turns sour. One thing gets said out of turn, and everyone is on everyone’s last nerve. After an hour of silence, we all start laughing about it.”
“When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.”
“My first interview at ‘SI,’ I sat in silence next to Guy LaFleur for five minutes on the New York Rangers team bus until he finally broke the ice. Those early interviews, every one of them was like a terrible first date.”
“With the exception of undertakers, athletes are the only professionals obliged to feign sorrow on a daily basis, pretending that every June baseball loss is a tragedy requiring library silence in the clubhouse.”
“I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.”
“I have a big problem with piped music. I like either silence or to listen to it properly.”
“I have a voice inside. A voice that I am forever trying to silence. A voice that calls me in when I want to be out, playing. A voice that is always sad. That is always terrified. That always wants to sit in the darkened room, away from noise and movement and colour – away from any experience that could prove to be challenging.”
“In the current environment, we find it very difficult to defend America, and so we keep our silence. Because, to be very frank with you, how can we defend America?”
“A story is told as much by silence as by speech.”
“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.”
“I saw the first of the 7-mile-long column appear – red and orange and green banners, ‘Ban the Bomb!’ etc., shining and swaying slowly. Absolute silence. I found myself weeping to see the tan, dusty marchers, knapsacks on their backs – Quakers and Catholics, Africans and whites, Algerians and French – 40 percent were London housewives.”
“And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.”
“I play music all the time because silence freaks me out.”
“Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.”
“To read Transtromer – the best times are at night, in silence, and alone – is to surrender to the far-fetched. It is to climb out of bed and listen to what the house is saying, and to how the wind outside responds. Each of his readers reads him as a personal secret.”
“Their silence is praise enough.”
“’Silence,’ I think, was the hardest, because it’s so different from everything we’ve done before and required very delicate handling and trying to find the right meditative pace.”
“In ‘Silence,’ there was no improvisation at all; really, you’re dealing with a script and a 17th century way of speaking.”
“It’s always an interesting experience for a politician to be heard in silence, I have to say.”
“When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.”
“Silence is more eloquent than words.”
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.”
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.”
“Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.”
“Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.”
“That man’s silence is wonderful to listen to.”
“I saw old Autumn in the misty morn stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence.”
“The way to silence religious disputes is to take no notice of them.”
“I can hear the roar of women’s silence.”
“The Man Without a Country, was an orator no one could silence and no one could answer.”
“When I’m channel surfing, and ‘Silence of the Lambs’ comes on, I have trouble turning it off. I wouldn’t say that about ‘Beautiful Mind.’ It’s a good movie, but I’m much more in awe of what Jonathan Demme did with ‘Silence of the Lambs.’”
“I grew up in New Mexico, and the older I get, I have less need for contemporary culture and big cities and all the stuff we are bombarded with. I am happier at my ranch in the middle of nowhere watching a bug carry leaves across the grass, listening to silence, riding my horse, and being in open space.”
“I began to think that if you’re a stutterer, it’s about inhabiting silence, emptiness, and nothingness.”
“Even the way Mamet describes silences within his plays is different. There are pauses; there are pauses within parentheses; there are pauses before dialogue; there are pauses in the spaces between the dialogue – there’s this extraordinary vocabulary of silence which is all there on the page, mapped out.”
“I was sitting in my office when someone called to tell me two light planes had collided with the World Trade Centre. I turned on my television; before long, there was this procession of people of all kinds walking up the street. What I remember most was the silence of that crowd; there was no sound.”
“When it shall be known that, at the time which I was accused of wishing to sunder this island from France – my benefactress – I repeated the oath of fidelity to her, I take pleasure in believing that the government I own, and my fellow-citizens, will render me the justice I merit, and that the enemies of my brethren will be reduced to silence.”
“Liars hate silence, so they often try to fill it up by talking more than they need to. They provide far more information than was needed or asked for.”
“When you ask someone a question and they’re slow to respond, don’t feel pressure to move the conversation forward. Remaining silent plays to your advantage. Moments of silence make people feel as though they should speak, especially when the ball is in their court. This is a great tool to use in negotiations and other difficult conversations.”
“Don’t ever silence your morality to be a part of anything.”
“I’m literally driving in the middle of the night, and my phone rings, and my manager says, ‘How would you like to be the host of the Daily Show?’ I get out the car, and I didn’t have legs. You know in those movies where there’s an explosion? But instead of the sound of the explosion, you hear the silence. That’s literally what happened.”
“I graduated from a place called Whitworth College in Spokane with a theater degree, then in 1993 I moved to L.A. and auditioned and did very well there. My first gig was playing a skinhead in John Singleton’s ‘Higher Learning’, and I played Glenn Close’s son in a TV movie called ‘Serving In Silence.’”
“I am a prince I have it all, and I hear your foot steps on the wall, I wait in silence for your call, and take a shot and watch you fall.”
“If I have a show at night, I like to spend the whole day alone in silence. I know that might be crazy.”
“There are nations, where people live in captivity, fear and silence. I believe, one day from prison camps and torture cells and from exile the leaders of freedom will emerge. The world should stand with those oppressed people until the day of their freedom finally arrives.”
“I am a boring loner. I enjoy Friday nights at home in my rocking chair with no arms, rocking and relaxing. It’s not uncommon for Netflix to be involved. Records are a possibility, but most of it is spent in silence.”
“I don’t have a BlackBerry or whatever you call it. And there is something to be said for being isolated and out of phone range, because you can fall into a habit to such a degree that you don’t even realise that you’ve lost something: silence.”
“In my mind, depression is, like all non-communicable diseases, a physiologically expressed condition which is profoundly influenced by our social and cultural environments. Depression is a global crisis not only because it is common and universal, but because the vast majority of affected people suffer in silence or receive inappropriate care.”
“French men can be very tough too, you know… Real bad boys move in silence, as we know, so you don’t have to be loud and muscular to be scary, actually.”
“The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.”
“The mere existence of ‘Buffy’ proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different – to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices.”
“Deep vengeance is the daughter of deep silence.”
“I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.”
“Now all my teachers are dead except silence.”
“What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.”
“The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation.”
“One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don’t hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.”
“Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can’t sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.”
“African women in general need to know that it’s OK for them to be the way they are – to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.”
“Everything that’s created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness.”
“There may be something good in silence. It’s a brand new thing. You can hear the funniest little discussions, if you keep turning the volume down. Shut yourself up, and listen out loud.”
“I don’t know what silence sounds like anymore.”
“He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence.”
“Put a bridle on thy tongue; set a guard before thy lips, lest the words of thine own mouth destroy thy peace… on much speaking cometh repentance, but in silence is safety.”
“There is a silence, the child of love, which expresses everything, and proclaims more loudly than the tongue is able to do.”
“The critical point is that the Constitution places the right of silence beyond the reach of government.”
“True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.”
“And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know.”
“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”
“You must learn to exist with no religion, no country, no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence.”
“The name Shatner is Austrian and partly Germanic, and there’s Germanic reticence and silence perhaps, but there is passion underneath.”
“They think because they have put my husband on an island that he will be forgotten. They are wrong. The harder they try to silence him, the louder I will become.”
“Some actors like encouragement. Some actors prefer to have pressure. And sometimes, for some actors, its better to give your comment by silence, because they are so skillful, so gifted, that they understand without talking too much.”
“Silence is refreshment for the soul.”
“Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!”
“The Election Commission stopped me from campaigning. I accepted it and reached people through my prayer – in silence. People gave their approval. Praying in silence is important, and this spiritual prayer has paid off.”
“I will not allow anyone to shut me up or shame me into silence, and I’m not going to rot away behind closed doors.”
“I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.”
“Leadership is about encouraging women to break their silence and tell their stories to the world.”
“Every woman must own her story; otherwise we are all part of the silence.”
“Being a leader for me is about having the courage to speak the truth, and live the truth, despite attempts to silence our thoughts, feelings, and past experiences.”
“I can write best in the silence and solitude of the night, when everyone has retired.”
“I love silence. But I usually only listen to that when I’m sleeping.”
“We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.”
“We belong to talking, not what talking is about… Stop talking – and you are out. Silence equals exclusion.”
