Telephones Quotes

The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees, ~ Michael Scanlon

The Quito telephone service is about as reliable as roulette. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone. ~ Rita Mae Brown

I can't remember my telephone number, but I know it was in the high numbers. ~ John Maynard Keynes

Claud twisted the television dial and amused himself by studying Flora's fair, pensive face. Her eyes were lowered and her mouth compressed over the serious business of arranging Elfine's future. He fancied she was tracing a pattern with the tip of her shoe. She could not look at him, because public telephones were not fitted with television dials. 'Oh, yes, we certainly don't ~ Stella Gibbons

All alone by the telephone. ~ Irving Berlin

All civilization in a sense exists only in the mind. Gunpowder, textile arts, machinery, laws, telephones are not themselves transmitted from man to man or from generation to generation, at least not permanently. It is the perception, the knowledge and understanding of them, their ideas in the Platonic sense, that are passed along. Everything social can have existence only through mentality. ~ Alfred L. Kroeber

The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web. ~ Edwin Way Teale

And it's okay if you have to go away Oh just remember the telephone works both ways And if I never ever hear them ring If nothing else I'll think the bells inside Have finally found you someone else and that's okay Cause I'll remember everything you sang ((You and I both)) ~ Jason Mraz

A nerd is someone who uses a telephone to talk to other people about telephones. ~ Douglas Adams

Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations. ~ Brian Eno

I think magic went out when people began to have steam-engines, and newspapers, and telephones and wireless telegraphing. ~ E. Nesbit

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen. ~ Alan W. Watts

There is no noise louder than a silent phone. ~ Lois Wyse

The press and politicians. A delicate relationship. Too close, and danger ensues. Too far apart and democracy itself cannot function without the essential exchange of information. Creative leaks, a discreet lunch, interchange in the Lobby, the art of the unattributable telephone call, late at night. ~ Howard Brenton

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered. ~ Barbara Demick

When Prince Charles speaks, everybody pretends to be fascinated, even though he has never said anything interesting except in that intercepted telephone conversation wherein he expressed the desire to be a feminine hygeine product. ~ Dave Barry

Henry Ford has several times sneered at unproductive stockholders ... Well, now. Let's see. Who made Henry Ford's own automobile company possible? The stockholders who originally advanced money to him. Who makes it possible for you and me to be carried to and from business by train or street car? Stockholders ... Who made our vast telephone and telegraph service possible? Stockholders ... Were stockholders all over the country to withdraw their capital from the enterprises in which they are invested, there would be a panic ... on a scale never before known. ~ B.C. Forbes

It's sort of my fun to sing along with records and imitate people who are on the telephone that have different ways of speaking. ~ Meryl Streep

All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America? ~ Fannie Lou Hamer

I was the apprentice of Robert James Bakker. I'm sure you've heard of him. I am a sorcerer. I was there when Bakker died. We ... made it happen. I too have met death, and did not have to peel the bones away from my chest to survive the encounter. I am also, and incidentally, the Midnight Mayor, the blue electric angels, the fire in the wire, the song in the telephones, and we are having a bad week. Be smart; fear us. ~ Kate Griffin

First electricity, now telephones. Sometimes I feel as if I'm living in an H.G. Wells novel. ~ Lady Violet

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward. ~ Donna Tartt

What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night. ~ Dave Barry

It's even hard for people to imagine today that telephones were wired, and they certainly were and you went to the end of a wire to make a phone call. ~ Nicholas Negroponte

By an irony of fate, my first employment was as a draughtsman. I hated drawing; it was for me the very worst of annoyances. Fortunately, it was not long before I secured the position I sought, that of chief electrician to the telephone company. ~ Nikola Tesla

My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there. ~ Abel Ferrara

We should treat computers as fancy telephones, whose purpose is to connect people ... As long as we remember that we ourselves are the source of our value, our creativity, our sense of reality, then all of our work with computers will be worthwhile and beautiful. ~ Jaron Lanier

Don't call me when you're stuck in traffic. It's not my fault that radio sucks and did it ever occur to you that there wouldn't be so much traffic if people like you put down the phone and concentrated on the road ... besides I can't talk now, I'm in the car behind you trying to watch a DVD. ~ Bill Maher

The Telephone will democratize hierarchic relations. ~ Ithiel De Sola Pool

When you consider that our technology has advanced from the first telephones to smart phones in roughly a century, it's easy to understand why it seems like tomorrow is arriving faster than it ever did. ~ Annalee Newitz

Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn't want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It's easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you've made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone's such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. ~ Ray Bradbury

The streets, at least in this part of town, seemed impossibly clean in comparison to London. The public telephones were unvandalised. For a London telephone booth to look like that it would have to be guarded around the clock by the SAS. ~ Clive James

By the beginning of March, K Company, 333rd Regiment, had reached the Rhine. The men settled down in the village of Krefeld to await Montgomery's Operation Plunder, the crossing of the river; Monty was planning the operation with as much care as he had put into Operation Overlord, so the pause was a long one. By some miracle, the men found an undamaged high-rise apartment building in which everything worked - electricity, hot water, flush toilets, and telephones with dial tones. The had their first hot baths in four months. They found cigars and bottles go cognac. Pvt. Ray Bocarski, fluent in German, lit up, sat down in an easy chair, got a befuddled German operator on the phone, and talked his way through to a military headquarters in Berlin. He told the German officer he could expect K Company within the week. ~ Stephen E. Ambrose

She [Joni Mitchell] wanted to have that (jazz) element in her music. Of course, when she heard Jaco's [Jaco Pastorius'] music and met him, that floored her
really grabbed her. She decided that Wayne Shorter was really conducive to her music. She would speak metaphorically about things. "I want this to sound like a taxicab driver, or a taxi in New York," or "I want this to sound like a telephone ringing." She would speak to musicians like that, and we really tuned into what she would want our music to be. ~ Don Alias

Yoga in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, or in any other place which is on the telephone, is a spiritual fake. ~ Carl Jung

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone. ~ Mark Twain

I think Gore does have to worry. He is tied to Bill Clinton. We know that there were telephone calls that he made from his office. We know that there were visits to the Buddhist temple. ~ Barbara Olson

Once I was standing in line to buy a telephone and Senator Wirth was in line with me. The next day the New York Times reported that we'd both purchased telephones and what price we'd paid! ~ Harold H. Greene

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ~ Cole Porter

I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can't see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter. ~ William, Saroyan

Often small acts of service are all that is required to lift and bless another. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them. ~ Christopher Morley

During the week that I arrived in the United States, I saw an airport, used a telephone, used a library, talked with a scientist, and was shown a computer for the first time in my life. ~ Philip Emeagwali

You know, a cell phone's like a guy; if you don't plug him in every night, charge him good, you got nothing at all. ~ Catherine Coulter

Ah, well! then the young woman was only in advance of the age," said Miss Archer; "and what with that and the telephone, and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future! ~ Ella Cheever Thayer

By focusing on the interior of a speaker's larynx and using infrared, he was able to convert the visible vibrations of the vocal cords into sound of fair quality, but that did not satisfy him. He worked for a while on vibrations picked up from panes of glass in windows and on framed pictures, and he experimented briefly with the diaphragms in speaker systems, intercoms and telephones. He kept on into October without stopping, and finally achieved a device that would give tinny but recognizable sound from any vibrating surface - a wall, a floor, even the speaker's own cheek or forehead. ~ Damon Knight

We can talk to one another on telephones
in banks, in cars, in line. No more
sitting on the floor
attached to a cord
while everybody listens.
No more
standing outside the booth
in the cold, fingering
an adulterous dime. We

send each other mail without stamps.
Watch television without antennas.
Wear seatbelts, smoke less, and never
on a bus, never
in the lobby while we're waiting
for the lawyer to call on us.

Nowhere now, a typewriter ribbon.
Quaintly the record album's scratch and spin.
Our groceries, scanned.
Pump our own gas.
Take off our shoes
before boarding our plane.
Those towers: Gone. And Pluto's
no longer a planet:
Forget it.
I could go on

and on, but you're still dead
and nothing's any different. ~ Laura Kasischke

As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life. ~ Martin Cooper

Invest in learning and discovering new filmmaking techniques is the next keystone to success. Film is changing rapidly right now. The last big change was the introduction of sound. This time around it is movies on th internet and mobile telephones. ~ Elliot Grove

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. ~ Richard Hugo

You haven't found all the answers yet. Electricity, telephones, these are lovely magic. But the poor go unfed. Men kill for what they cannot gain by their own labour. How to share the magic, the riches, the secrets, that is still the problem. ~ Anne Rice

It's a dialogue, not a monologue, and some people don't understand that. Social media is more like a telephone than a television. ~ Amy Jo Martin

The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense. ~ Ray Kurzweil

Back then, the excise tax was designed to be a luxury tax for people who owned telephones. ~ Mike Fitzpatrick

The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse. ~ Charles Williams

And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal. ~ Steve Case

The truth is everybody does it from time to time. People dial telephone numbers and they get a wrong number only to find that they've read the last two digits backwards. Everybody does it, but dyslexics have this tendency to a higher degree. ~ Caitlyn Jenner

The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent. ~ Alexander Graham Bell

The evidence that things are changing fast can be seen in the dramatic increase in the influence of blogging. We should be collecting emails as we used to collect telephone numbers and using them to better communicate our message to key voters. ~ Adam Rickitt

In this time of recession, it is the time for invention. Did you know both the telephone and the automobile were invented during recessions? So was 'talking dirty.' ~ Eugene Mirman

I like to have my morning newspaper ironed before I read it. I like to have my shoes boned before they are polished. I like to sit in the back of the car and be driven. I like beds to be made, dishes to be washed, grass to be cut, drinks to be served, telephones to be answered, and common tasks to be dealt with invisibly and efficiently so that I can devote my time to major decisions like the choice of wines for dinner and who to vote for in the next election for the mayor of my village.
That is life as it should be lived, and all it takes is money and servants. ~ Peter Mayle

If it is mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone-exchange. We are supposing it to be a telephone-exchange along with subscribers as well. ~ Charles Scott Sherrington

This is as good a time as any to comment on what I think has grown into an abuse. Congress makes holidays and every time there isa holiday it is the practice for one department to telephone over to another department and say we are going to have an extra holiday in this department and what is your department going to do about it ... If it comes on Saturday, they want a holiday on Friday, and of course they couldn't come back and travel on Sunday and so they want another holiday on Monday to get back on. ~ Calvin Coolidge

A hat is a snake is a lamp is a child is an insect is a clothesline hung with telephones. ~ Jedediah Berry

I have gone on the air and announced my telephone number at the Washington Post. I go into the night, talking to people, looking for things. The great dreaded thing every reporter lives with is what you don't know. The source you didn't go to. The phone call you didn't return. ~ Bob Woodward

We would never get away from it ... It's bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption? ~ Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin

What can I be thinking of? Just imagine my not having presented myself to you even yet! But as a matter of fact I do not want to tell you my name
out loud; it is a romantic one, utterly inappropriate to the typically modern environment in which we now stand. Ah,
if we were only on the steep side of some mountain with the moon like a great lamp above us, or by the shore of
some wild ocean, there would be some glamour in proclaiming my identity in the silence of the night, or in the midst of lightning and thunder as a hurricane swept the seas! But here in a third-floor suite of the Royal Palace
Hotel, surrounded by telephones and electric lights, and standing by a window overlooking the Champs Elysees-> it would be positively anachronistic!" He took a card out of his pocket and drew near the little writing desk. "Allow me, Princess, to slip my card into this drawer, left open on purpose, it would seem," and while the princess uttered a little cry she could not repress, he did just that. "And now, Princess," he went on, compelling her to retreat before him as he moved to the door of the anteroom opening on to the corridor, "you are too well bred, I am sure, not to wish to conduct your visitor to the door of your suite." His tone altered abruptly, and in a deep imperious voice that made the princess quake he ordered her: "And now, not a word, not a cry, not a movement until I am outside, or I will kill you! ~ Marcel Allain

I want to apologize for plaguing you with so many telephone calls last November and December. When the 'enthusiasm' is coming on me it is accompanied by a feverish reaching out to my friends. After its over I wince and wither. ~ Robert Lowell

Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule. ~ Satyajit Ray

A surefire method of setting up regular communication with your kids is to get a job in an office which discourages personal phone calls. Your kids will then call you every hour on the hour. ~ Teresa Bloomingdale

Never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them - and for us - is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the ... politicians ... an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords - and we will be the poorer for it. ~ Kevin Williams

There was a time when nails were high-tech. There was a time when people had to be told how to use a telephone. Technology is just a tool. People use tools to improve their lives. ~ Tom Clancy

Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before. ~ Mark Twain

When I write a song today, basically it goes on the stage tomorrow. That's the way it works. You cannont interrupt your consciousness; it all comes from the subconscious, it can happen anywhere. It could be in a telephone booth. ~ Richie Havens

I have always been allergic to telephones. As far as I am concerned, they are very seldom time-savers and very often the destroyers of schedules. ~ Frances Parkinson Keyes

To illustrate to the Indians the advantages the white race had in the telephone I divided a body of warriors from Sitting Bull's camp into two parties and had them talk to each other over the telephone line. ~ Nelson A. Miles

I am honestly starting to question evolution. We went from cavemen, to homo sapiens, to this incredible society of great minds - Alexander Graham Bell inventing telephones, Steve Jobs inventing…everything. And now we're devolving. We've travelled back to cavemen, only nowadays we call them fuckboys. ~ Elle Kennedy

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Today the telephone takes precedence over everything. It reaches a point of terrorism, particularly at dinnertime. ~ Niels Diffrient

I assume everything I'm saying in an email or saying on the telephone is being looked at. ~ Michael Moore

The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful. ~ Janice Galloway

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest. ~ Emily Greene Balch

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? --I explain that, Mr
Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead. ~ John Berryman

I believe in imagination. I was a worker when I was 17. Between 17 and 21, I was a worker in the telephone company and imagination saved my life. ~ Jean-Pierre Jeunet

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone? ~ Walter Isaacson

Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system. ~ Nick Hornby

I meet with virtually everybody that comes down to Olympia, that Facebook messages me or emails me or calls me on the telephone. And, in particular, last year I was very proud to go speak before a group that I was invited to by a lesbian anarchist, I mean, my goodness gracious! I can listen and work with anybody. ~ Matt Shea

In July everybody you telephone is somewhere else - either on the beach or on vacation, and half the time you're somewhere else too. ~ Jean Hersey

A peels an apple, while B kneels to God,
C telephones to D, who has a hand
On E's knee, F coughs, G turns up the sod
For H's grave, I do not understand
But J is bringing one clay pigeon down
While K brings down a nightstick on L's head,
And M takes mustard, N drives to town,
O goes to bed with P, and Q drops dead,
R lies to S, but happens to be heard
By T, who tells U not to fire V
For having to give W the word
That X is now deceiving Y with Z,
Who happens, just now to remember A
Peeling an apple somewhere far away. ~ Howard Nemerov

I rarely use the telephone because he may not want to see me. I have a better chance of seeing the man I want to see if I do go. Besides, switchboard girls and secretaries have become very good. They've learned to take you apart. 'Who? Why? What for? What company?' You don't always get by. I seldom call on the phone. I'd rather go. ~ Ben Feldman

Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses, I shall cal an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, determine, intercept, model, control , or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and - why not - language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses - one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primitive inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face. ~ Giorgio Agamben

Bridging the virtual world with the physical word is really when social media channels come to life and the magic happens. Because whoever coined the term 'social media' didn't do us any favors. It's not really media. It's more like the telephone, less like the TV. ~ Amy Jo Martin

Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval - a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old - and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers. ~ Bill Bryson

"So we'd get in a horse and buggy and we would go and park under a tree and we'd read poetry to each other." And my grandfather told me all the stories. I mean, their way of communicating ... They didn't have telephones, either, so they communicated with the written word. And I really ... That's how old [Bill] Clinton has become to me [ speaking of how he met Hillary Clinton]. ~ Rush Limbaugh

The telephone is a great knee-jerk machine, but if you really want to tell someone how you feel, you need the slowness of the letter. In a society where everything is fast, it's like going out in the country and looking up at the stars. ~ Nick Bantock

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before. ~ Ross Perot

It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. ~ Paul Auster

Reached only by boat, seaplane and, with less surety, telephone-this is Fire Island, a pile of sand beneath a pile of people. ~ Al Aronowitz

I hate the telephone. I think the lowest circle of hell is reserved for Alexander Graham Bell. ~ Rita Mae Brown