Dialogue Breakdown Quotes

If the impoverishment and community fragmentation continue, it is not a stretch to predict urban wars sparked by inequality, unemployment, and the breakdown of dialogue between leaders and citizens.

There,” she said triumphantly. “Like that.” He began to wonder if they were speaking the same language. “Like what?” “That! What you just said.” He crossed his arms. It seemed the only acceptable reply. If she couldn’t speak in complete sentences, he saw no reason why he had to speak at all.

Being hated and hunted and blamed for your own suffering makes people kind of testy, nervous, and on edge, and often fundamentalist and extreme. Bombs get thrown only when people cannot honestly talk together.

I started really thinking a lot about where does a country go when we stop being able to speak to each other, when a nation stops being able to solve problems because its ideological differences become so deep that it just becomes dysfunctional.

In this political climate, people are so shut down to other ideas - I call it a hardening of the categories - that if you can get them to open up and laugh, there is a possibility of improvement, and a possibility of change. I think humor sneaks up on people, and before you know it, you're laughing at something you might not agree with.

God, America is a country predicated on listening to everybody. When did we stop listening to one another?

We battle on in words, as always, mere words, and what's the cure? We cannot find a thing.

One of the most serious problems that our country has inherited an unwillingness to talk to anyone who disagrees with us or who won't accept, before a discussion, all the premises that we demand.

Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others, but only widen it.