Make no mistake when you open your mouth: words are potent. Whether it's a big speech in front of a full auditorium or a one-to-one talk across a table, every time you're speaking you are a public speaker.

We can choose to use this force constructively-we can encourage, praise, nurture, champion, and support. Or, we can use words destructively-by choosing to discourage, intimidate, prevent, unnerve, or crush.

Either way, the admonition is clear-think before you speak.

  1. Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble.
    -Yehuda Berg
  2. The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said.
    -Peter Drucker
  3. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
    -George Bernard Shaw
  4. If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time-a tremendous whack.
    -Winston Churchill
  5. The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.
    -Sydney J. Harris
  6. The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
    -Gustave Flaubert
  7. Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
    -Robert Frost
  8. Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing.
    -Rollo May
  9. You can change your world by changing your words... Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.
    -Joel Osteen
  10. Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.
    -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
  11. The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
    -Hans Hofmann
  12. Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.
    -Charles Dickens
  13. The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
    -Philip K. Dick
  14. The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
    -Joseph Priestley
  15. Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.
    -Jim Rohn
  16. To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
    -Will Durant
  17. It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
    -Italo Calvino
  18. It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
    -Mark Twain
  19. Any problem, big or small, within a family, always seems to start with bad communication. Someone isn't listening.
    -Emma Thompson
  20. Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.
    -Earl Wilson
  21. The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
    -May Sarton