Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

-Eliot,T(homas) S(tearns)
  Dante.

I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else† I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotionsötragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so onöand the fact that lots of people breakdown and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

-Rothko, Mark originally Marcus Rothkovitch
Quoted in R Rosenblum Modern Painting and the Northern RomanticTradition (1975).

Weare not going after Saddam Hussein.If I caneliminate his ability to communicate with his forces, I would be entirely satisfied with that result.

-Schwarzkopf, H Norman
  Press briefing on the start of the Gulf War,15 Jan.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

-Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia ne¤  e Stephen
  The Common Reader,'On Not Knowing Greek'.