Human Conversation Quotes

Education is ... the invitation to disentangle oneself, for a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and to listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves.

This, I believe, is the appropriate image of human intercourse -- appropriate because it recognizes the qualities, the diversities, and the proper relationships of human utterances. As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

Having a human conversation is not something I've had any training in either as a comedian or as, you know, a human being.

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

If your reading life and your friendships overlap, that's just a nice coincidence - a case where the conversation you're having with books and the conversation you're having with actual human beings happen to dovetail.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.