Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in few words

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?

Common sense is the very antipodes of science.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Look at the stars and not down at your own feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man's upper chamber, if he has common sense on the ground floor.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.

Man's tongue is soft, and bone doth lack; yet a stroke therewith may break a man's back.

He’s a wonderful talker, who has the art of telling you nothing in a great harangue.

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

Man is a social animal.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably gracious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

The day will soon come when I will show the world that the transmission of power and speech without the aid of any wires is possible.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

Teach your child to hold his tongue; he'll learn fast enough to speak.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

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