Quotes & Sayings About Telephones

If these replacements for human labour are not yet feasible, it is likely that they soon will be. Self-driving cars and telephones that interact with human voices are the front line of a rapidly advancing trend. Occupations that seemed safe because they required a level of skill or education are no longer secure. — John N. Gray

He couldn't answer me (the ghosts' voices didn't make it through telephones), but he could hear what I said. I felt like I was talking to myself, which was only about the seventeenth weirdest thing I'd done today. And it was just two in the afternoon. "She's — E.J. Copperman

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

Communism is just one big telephone company. — Lenny Bruce

I have always been the lover - never the beloved - and I have spent much of my life waiting for trains, planes, boats, footsteps, doorbells, letters, telephones, snow, rain, thunder. — John Cheever

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

He loves white cables. And white telephones. And white computer monitors with fruit on the back. — Fredrik Backman

Now we can travel with more books stored in our telephones than the ancient Egyptians kept in their vast library at Alexandria. — Mike Aquilina

Things are no longer what they seem to be. My telephones are haunted, and animals whisper at me from unseen places. — Hunter S. Thompson

Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income. — Ray Bradbury

"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

There would be far fewer accidents if we could only teach telephone poles to be more careful. — Ambrose Bierce

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

What Bell is to the telephone - or, more aptly, what Eastman is to photography - Haloid could be to xerography. — Chester Carlson

Success is when your name is in everything but the telephone directory. — Sam Ewing

In these days of instant gratification and electronic wizardry there are still some people, real people, who do not panic when their telephones fail because the batteries need re-charging. Instead they plug, not into an electronic device but into the earth, feel the wind in their hair, listen to the joyous, constant reaffirmation of running water and feel the good sun or refreshing rain on their skin. They, and only they, can be truly re-charged. — Anonymous

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters. meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that might be carelessly overlooked. This feeling has become a rarity, and rarer every day now that we have reached a hastier and more superficial rhythm, now that we believe we are in touch with a greater amount of people, more people, more countries. This is the illusion which might cheat us of being in touch deeply with the one breathing next to us. The dangerous time when mechanical voices, radios, telephones, take the place of human intimacies, and the concept of being in touch with millions brings a greater and greater poverty in intimacy and human vision. — Anais Nin

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters. — Agnes Repplier

We had no idea that in as little as 35 years more than half the people on Earth would have cellular telephones, and they give the phones away to people for nothing. — Martin Cooper

Telephone conversations are so inadequate, so lacking in expression and gesture and everything. — Jo Walton

Isn't it better to live in ignorance of everything
asphalt and macadam, vehicles, telephones, televisions
to live in bliss without knowing it? — Greg Mortenson

At first, they joked about it but as they became more detoxed and more assertive from therapy, paid ironically by the husbands, they began to realize that they each had unique strengths and powers and a burning desire for revenge. Between the Three Wise Women they had an IT expert, an actress and a supermodel, all very wealthy and beautiful. All the three men's' brains appeared to reside in their pants and they wondered if they set a honey trap could it possibly work. A plan was proposed by Felicity and she called it Operation Devastation. Angelina would hack into their MIS computer systems, bug their telephones, offices, cars and homes. Ava would seduce Ryan, who owned Novels and the computer firm, Angelina's husband in a honey trap and get it all on DVD for the divorce court. Then Ava would seduce Felicity's husband, James, the Irish footballer. Finally, Sean who was Felicity's friend who was an out of work actor would seduce Patrick — Annette J. Dunlea

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible, ... They design telephones to look great, but they sound horrible. I think it was about time that the other senses were celebrated. — Bjork

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

I have no sex appeal and it has screwed me up for life; my gynecologist examines me by telephone. — Joan Rivers

In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of the case for a long, long time. — Renata Adler

Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones. — Janet Fitch

Once upon a time there was a mother who, in order to become a mother, had agreed to change her name; who set herself the task of falling in love with her husband bit-by-bit, but who could n ever manage to love one part, the part, curiously enough, which made possible her motherhood; whose feet were hobbled by verrucas and whose shoulders were stooped beneath the accumulating guilts of the world; whose husband's unlovable organ failed to recover from the effects of a freeze; and who, like her husband, finally succumbed to the mysteries of telephones, spending long minutes listening to the words of wrong-number callers ... shortly after my tenth birthday (when I had recovered from the fever which has recently returned to plague me after an interval of nearly twenty-one years), Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving suddenly, and always immediately after a wrong number, on urgent shopping trips. — Salman Rushdie

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

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

Excuse me, everybody, I have to go to the bathroom. I really have to telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so. — Dorothy Parker

Some one invented the telephone, And interrupted a nation's slumbers, Ringing wrong but similar numbers. — Ogden Nash

When I grew up in India, telephones were a rarity. In fact, they were so rare that elected members of Parliament had the right to allocate 15 telephone lines as a favor to those they deemed worthy. If you were lucky enough to be a wealthy businessman or an influential journalist, or a doctor or something, you might have a telephone. — Shashi Tharoor

In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones - another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure - they had time for everything: time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady! — Booth Tarkington

All alone by the telephone. — Irving Berlin

It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence? — Barbara Kingsolver

My god! i'm thinking, what incredible shit we've put up with most of our lives - the domestic routine (same old jobs, insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessman, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of automatic washers and automobiles and tv machines and telephones -! ah christ!, i'm thinking, at the same time that i'm waving goodby to that hollering idiot on shore, what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote) — Edward Abbey

In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb. — George Gilder

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

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

Do you remember when we were kids and played that game 'Telephone'? It was like that. The first time I heard about it, someone said he'd been shot 17 times. — Carson Daly

First words on the first telephone - "Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you." — Alexander Graham Bell

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

It's unacceptable that consumers are punished on their telephone bill simply for crossing a border. — Viviane Reding

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

In my room, I looked around at all the pieces of my life, neat and tidy on their little shelves, my clothes and books and telephones, my shoes and hair barrettes, and tried to care about them. Mine, mine, mine. But they were only things, things that could have belonged to anyone. — Aryn Kyle

Cyberspace is where you are when you're on the telephone. — William Gibson

I've tried plenty of telephones. I tried to get into the Samsung Galaxy and the Blackberry, but the iPhone is just too easy to use. The camera takes clear pictures and the phone itself looks great. Like all Apple products, it kind of just makes sense. — Avicii

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

In all those types of films I wore a tan suit, a grey suit, a beige suit and then a negligee for the seventh reel near the end when I would admit to my best friend on the telephone that what I really wanted was to become a little housewife. — Rosalind Russell

Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition. — Dennis Gabor

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

I think if you asked people "what's the biggest problem in your life?" They'd say, "I just don't have time for anything!" And at our fingertips, if it isn't e-mail, it's our Blackberry, and it's our iPods and telephones - we never stop. We never take those moments to stop the stimulus to find out "what's going on in there? What's really happening?" And then things start to build up. And then we are almost afraid to slow down. — Elizabeth Lesser

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

We already know that spam is a huge downside of online life. If we're going to be spammed on our telephones wherever we go, I think we're going to reject these devices. — Howard Rheingold

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

As expected, you get his machine. Someday, even the "call of nature" will be answered by a machine. — Tom Robbins

I'd play every day if I could. It's cheaper than a shrink and there are no telephones on my golf cart. — Brent Musburger

Keep in mind our Constitution predates the Industrial Revolution. Our founders did not know about electricity, the train, telephones, radio, television, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, nuclear weapons, satellites, or space exploration. There's a lot they didn't know about. It would be interesting to see what kind of document they'd draft today. Just keeping it frozen in time won't hack it. — Ross Perot

BILLS! BILLS! BILLS!' she screamed. 'IS THAT ALL YOU CAN BRING ME? THESE BILLS?'
'Yes, mam, that's all I can bring you.'
I turned and walked on.
It wasn't my fault that they used telephones and gas and light and bought all their things on credit. Yet when I brought them their bills they screamed at me - as if I had asked them to have a phone installed, or a $350 t.v. set sent over with no money down. — Charles Bukowski

Hi, this is Sylvia. I'm not at home right now, so when you hear the beep ... hang up. — Nicole Hollander

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

In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts, and even the clouds had names. Scissors could walk, telephones and teapots were first cousins, eyes and eyeglasses were brothers. The face of the clock was a human face, each pea in your bowl had a different personality, and the grille on the front of your parents' car was a grinning mouth with many teeth. Pens were airships. Coins were flying saucers. The branches of trees were arms. Stones could think, and God was everywhere. — Paul Auster

I have a hold limit that I've set for myself. I hold until I start to imagine myself killing the person on the other end. Then I hang up and regroup. — Rita Rudner

Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications? — Donald A. Norman

I sensed my chance and embraced the telecom business. I started marketing telephones, answering/fax machines under the brand name Beetel, and the company picked up really fast. — Sunil Mittal

In heaven, you get right through. In hell, they put you on hold. — Gail Parent

I thought talk was cheap until I saw our telephone bill. — Henny Youngman

You have to distinguish between two things - the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones from Ericsson, cars from Volvo, chickens from Scan, and shipments from Kiruna to Skovde. That's the Swedish economy, and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago ...
The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with the Swedish economy. — Stieg Larsson

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

For the modern solitary, the quest for silence has vastly broader boundaries than what one's predecessors faced. Solitude is real only when it is relative to the world in which it is lived. It is unreal if attempted in fantasy--as though telephones and fax machines, the Internet and E-mail did not exist. (36) — Barbara Erakko Taylor

The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe. — Wyndham Lewis

My dear father always said that when everybody had a telephone nobody would have any manners, because there wouldn't be time for them. And of course he was perfectly right ... — Patricia Wentworth

I experimented a bunch with Ernie Ball in getting the strings to not flop around too much, but at the same time not to be too thick to where you're playing telephone cables. — John Petrucci

The sharp scents made my throat ache. I had been up such hillsides before, and smelled these same spring scents. But then the pine and grass scent had been diluted with the smell of petrol fumes from the road below and the voices of day trippers replaced those of the jays. Last time I walked such a path, the ground was littered with sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts instead of mallow blossoms and violets. Sandwich wrappers seemed a reasonable enough price to pay, I supposed, for such blessings of civilization as antibiotics and telephones, but just for the moment, I was willing to settle for the violets. I badly needed a little peace, and I felt it here. — Diana Gabaldon

Disembodied spirits," said his partner, "are not known to use telephones. Neither are spooks, phantoms, or werewolves."

"That was in the old days. Why shouldn't they change with the times and be modern, too? — Robert Arthur

I have always looked upon a telephone as an official kind of machine which you prepared for with fasting and prayer, and only had recourse to when strictly necessary for important business. — C.N. Williamson

I don't like telephones: I don't like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don't even like opening mail; I'm weird. — Douglas Coupland

In heaven, when the blessed use the telephone they will say what they have to say and not a word besides. — W. Somerset Maugham

Happiness is a house without a telephone. — Gay Byrne

In the United States all business not transacted over the telephone is accomplished in conjunction with alcohol or food, often under conditions of advanced intoxication. This is a fact of the utmost importance for the visitor of limited funds ... for it means that the most expensive restaurants are, with rare exceptions, the worst. — John Kenneth Galbraith

There were people who occupied telephone booths as though they had rented them for the day. — Ursula Curtiss

That telephones can connect us in seconds to any creature on earth foolhardy enough to lift its own chunk of plastic is wonderful. But it's also terrible, given what a lot of people think and feel about each other. That's why, until they're equipped with some sort of flush or filter or waste-disposal system for the billions of words that ought not to be spoken, I'll not trust the things. — David James Duncan

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

You call this progress, because you have motor cars and telephones and flying machines and a thousand potions to make you smell better? And people sleeping on the streets? — Howard Zinn

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

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

It never ceases to amaze me how many Christians, in the North and the South, continue to refer to the former as the "developed" and the latter as the "developing" world. When we in the South use this term to describe ourselves, we are evaluating ourselves by a set of cultural values that are alien to our own cultures, let alone to a Christian world-view! All our normative images and yardsticks of "development" are ideologically loaded. Who dictates that mushrooming TV satellite dishes and skyscrapers are signs of "development"? Who, apart from the automobile industry and the advertising agencies, seriously believes that a country with six-lane highways and multi-story car-parks is more "developed" than one whose chief mode of transport is railways? Does the fact that there are more telephones in Manhattan, New York, than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, mean that human communication is more developed in the former than the latter? — Vinoth Ramachandra

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses - 120 war-horses - musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations."2698 Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing. — Richard Rhodes

The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

I need to go someplace faraway that doesn't have telephones and doesn't have a record player and doesn't have movie theaters and people walking down the street in order to not do anything. — Will Oldham

Letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps - who knows? - we might talk by the way. — Virginia Woolf

We know enough to be sure that the scientific achievements of the next fifty years will be far greater, more rapid, and more surprising, than those we have already experienced ... Wireless telephones and television, following naturally upon the their present path of development, would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window. — Winston Churchill

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

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

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

In the clearness of this Himalayan air, mountains draw near, and in such splendor, tears come quietly to my eyes and cool on my sunburned cheeks. this is not mere soft-mindedness, nor am I all that silly with the altitude. My head has cleared in these weeks free of intrusions- mail, telephones, people and their needs- and I respond to things spontaneously, without defensive or self-conscious screens. Still, all this feeling is astonishing: not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years. — Peter Matthiessen

Canceling my landline phone account, cutting off service to my home for good, and rendering the telephones that had long sat on tables in every room as useless as my closeted bread machine, I took the final step in a lifelong attempt to free myself from the wires that tethered me. — Kara Swisher

Alexander Graham Bell was the first person to ever sarcastically say hello. Hellooo, I invented the telephone! — Andy Kindler