1085 – “Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that’s why laws were created.”

-José Saramago

1008 – “You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.”

-Fitzwilliam Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

920 – “I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.”

-Rutherford B Hayes, 19th President of the United States of America

703 – “Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?”

–Kainene in a letter to Richard Churchill in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

497 – “There are many ways to silence young people and make them invisible. Many ways to anesthetize them, to make them keep quiet, ask nothing, question nothing. There are many ways to sedate them, to keep them from getting involved, to make their dreams flat and dreary, petty and plaintive. … Dear young people, you have it in you to shout.”

–Pope Francis, Bishop of Rome

444 – “Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star.”

–e e Cummings [See Source Notes for entire poem]

392 – “Violent conflicts create zones of silence in a society. The deeds and responsibility of the perpetrators are concealed. Thus also the suffering of the victims, the role of the spectators… The silence is often passed on to the next generation.”

–Dan Bar-On [Attributed]

354 – “There’s really no such thing as the voiceless. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

–Arundhati Roy

313 – “Don’t ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, nor my kindness for weakness.”

–anonymous

240 – “I loved her not for the way she danced with my angels, but for the way the sound of her name could silence my demons.”

–Christopher Poindexter