As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.
~By Benjamin Franklin ~
I can hear the roar of women's silence.
~By Thomas Sankara ~
Before the war is ended, the war party assumes the divine right to denounce and silence all opposition to war as unpatriotic and cowardly.
~By Robert M. La Follette ~
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
~By Martin Luther King, Jr. ~
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.
~By Bruce Jackson ~
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.
~By Joyce Carol Oates ~
I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman; I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don't respect.
~By Sandra Cisneros ~
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
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.
~By Albert Camus ~
Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
~By Josh Billings ~
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
~By Blaise Pascal ~
I, schooled in misery, know many purifying rites, and I know where speech is proper and where silence.
~By Aeschylus ~
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.
~By Octavia Butler ~
Silence is more eloquent than words.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
~By Elizabeth I ~
True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
~By William Penn ~
Silence is the mother of truth.
~By Benjamin Disraeli ~
The Man Without a Country, was an orator no one could silence and no one could answer.
~By Thomas Starr King ~
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.
~By Octavio Paz ~
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
~By Edith Sitwell ~
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.
~By Alice Cooper ~
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
~By W. S. Merwin ~
A moment of silence is not inherently religious.
~By Sandra Day O'Connor ~
And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.
~By Dorothy Dix ~
Silence is the sure sign that you're on your way out in Hollywood.
~By Budd Schulberg ~
Silence is golden when you can't think of a good answer.
~By Muhammad Ali ~
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.
~By Shelley Winters ~
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.
~By Judy Garland ~
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
~By Charles Simic ~
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.
~By Wes Borland ~
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.
~By Angelina Grimke ~
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.
~By Mary Wollstonecraft ~
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'.
~By Joan Miro ~
In love, we worry more about the meaning of silences than the meaning of words.
~By Mason Cooley ~
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.
~By Dana Hill ~
Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
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.
~By William Drummond ~
The only way to silence a room that's laughing at you is to sort of take over.
~By Peter Sarsgaard ~
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.
~By John Cage ~
Silence is best.
~By John Hewson ~
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.
~By Dino De Laurentiis ~
Silence is as deep as eternity, speech a shallow as time.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
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!
~By Jonathan Demme ~
Silence, exile, cunning and so on... it's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work.
~By Don DeLillo ~
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
~By Ansel Adams ~
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.
~By Emile M. Cioran ~
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.
~By Devon Werkheiser ~
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.
~By Paul Robeson ~
There is no way to ease the burden. The voyage leads on from harm to harm, A land of others and of silence.
~By Donald Justice ~
In some causes silence is dangerous.
~By Saint Ambrose ~
Your silence will not protect you.
~By Audre Lorde ~
Silence is better than unmeaning words.
~By Pythagoras ~
The intellectual debility of contemporary conservatism is indicated by its silence on all important matters.
~By Christopher Lasch ~
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.
~By Lance Morrow ~
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
~By Alexander Theroux ~
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.
~By Jean Arp ~
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
~By Francis Bacon ~
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.
~By Philip Pullman ~
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.
~By Margaret Sanger ~
We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.
~By Boyle Roche ~
I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.
~By Georg Trakl ~
But the child's sob curses deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath!
~By Elizabeth Barrett Browning ~
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
~By Audre Lorde ~
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.
~By Emanuel Ax ~
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.
~By Robert Stone ~
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.
~By Pope John Paul II ~
I refuse to be silenced.
~By Al Goldstein ~
Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
~By Henri Nouwen ~
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
~By Charles de Gaulle ~
If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
~By Vincent Van Gogh ~
I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
~By Elie Wiesel ~
Silence is refreshment for the soul.
~By Wynonna Judd ~
Odd how much it hurts when a friend moves away- and leaves behind only silence.
~By Pam Brown ~
A man is known by the silence he keeps.
~By Oliver Herford ~
Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead.
~By Cherrie Moraga ~
I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.
~By Khalil Gibran ~
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.
~By Federico Garcia Lorca ~
Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.
~By Epictetus ~
Bigotry and intolerance, silenced by argument, endeavors to silence by persecution, in old days by fire and sword, in modern days by the tongue.
~By Charles Simmons ~
If there's a silence in a room I'll try to fill it as soon as humanly possible.
~By Matthew Perry ~
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.
~By Archibald MacLeish ~
Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
~By Mark Helprin ~
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.
~By Samuel Beckett ~
Sometimes there is a greater lack of communication in facile talking than in silence.
~By Faith Baldwin ~
Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.
~By Elliott Carter ~
With the exception of the New York Times, Fox news, and Lou Dobbs of CNN, and talk radio, the rest of the mainstream media has basically been silenced like a bunch of dumb monkeys.
~By Curt Weldon ~
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
~By Marcel Marceau ~
Indeed if we Christians so tell our story that Judaism is silenced, then we have not spoken rightly of Christ.
~By Timothy Radcliffe ~
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence.
~By Pierre Bourdieu ~
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn stand shadowless like silence, listening to silence.
~By Thomas Hood ~
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.
~By Trey Anastasio ~
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.
~By Nellie Bly ~
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves.
~By Maurice Maeterlinck ~
I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine.
~By Gordon Getty ~
I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
~By Samuel Beckett ~
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint.
~By Marianne Moore ~
Words can sting like anything, but silence breaks the heart.
~By Phyllis McGinley ~
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