What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.
Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent.
Truth can be outraged by silence quite as cruelly as by speech.
...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.
Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.
If you don't have music, you have silence. There is power in both.
Silence is most powerful. Speech is always less powerful than silence.
...it was better to answer, no matter how ineptly, thank to withhold a reply. Because sometimes silence could wound someone nearly as badly as a bullet.
Better a thousandfold abuse of speech than a denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
It's not the violence of the few that scares me, it's the silence of the many
When you're winning, anything you say has value. When you're losing, the less you say, the better.
Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
To choose to be silent in any scene sometimes has more notes in my script than when you chose to speak.
The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.
