“No man ever listened himself out of a job.”
“The more you know the less you need to say.”
“To talk without thinking is to shoot without aiming.”
“I prefer tongue-tied knowledge to ignorant loquacity.”
“What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.”
“They never taste who always drink; they always talk who never think.”
“I don't mind how much my ministers talk -- as long as they do what I say.”
“I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.”
“A good old man, sir. He will be talking. As they say, when the age is in, the wit is out.”
“I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.”
“The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds.”
“How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.”
“We never say so much as when we do not quite know what we want to say. We need few words when we have something to say, but all the words in all the dictionaries will not suffice when we have nothing to say and want desperately to say it.”
“Well, well, perhaps I am a bit of a talker. A popular fellow such as I am -- my friends get round me -- we chaff, we sparkle, we tell witty stories -- and somehow my tongue gets wagging. I have the gift of conversation. I've been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”
“My great-grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.”