Telephone Quotes

Not since the steam engine has any invention disrupted business models like the Internet. Whole industries including music distribution, yellow-pages directories, landline telephones, and fax machines have been radically reordered by the digital revolution.

Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.

Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn’t get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn’t art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn’t art.

Telephone operators have called me ‘sir’ since I was 6.

I make money because I have to pay for everything apart from my school fees. My mother even makes me pay my own telephone bill.

I get letters constantly from all over the world, telephone calls from America, Brazil, Australia, all over, especially on my birthday. A family? I have a huge international family. That’s all I need.

In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.

It seems that probably Putin’s father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn’t have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

The KKK members that I was dealing with never saw me because my interaction with them occurred over the phone. They were convinced that I was 1) white, and 2) a racial supremacist like them based strictly on my telephone conversation with them.

Easy is to occupy a place in a telephone book. Difficult is to occupy someone’s heart; know that you’re really loved.

I found that my career at Bell Telephone Labs thrived because of the environment, which encouraged cooperative research, offered opportunities for access to sophisticated equipment, and fellowship.

Garbage can provide important details for hackers: names, telephone numbers, a company’s internal jargon.

I have never been able to remember the number of my driver’s license, and there have been times when I couldn’t even remember my own telephone number, but when I hear a song, sometimes only once, I never forget the melody or the lyric.

I go to schools in L.A., and I teach lessons. I run with the girls and teach them things about bullying and gossip. For instance, we’d play things like telephone, where you can actually see how words get twisted.

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.

Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.

Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two, opulence is when you have three – and paradise is when you have none.

It could be a little bit sad as a young girl to sit there and wait in front of the telephone that would never ring.

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.

While in the early days of networks, growth was limited by slowness and cost at numerous points – expensive telephone connections, computers that crashed, browsers that didn’t work – the rise of the smartphone has essentially changed all that.

The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity.

You should not be a slave to your telephone. The technology is there to serve you, not the other way around.

Howard Hughes himself was a regular at the restaurant, and in a way it became his headquarters, too. Howard had recently relocated to Las Vegas, so when he wanted to do business in Los Angeles, he went into the back of our restaurant to use the telephone.

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.

What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don’t really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don’t you?

This is like the telephone problem – no one wants to have the first one. But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.

The telephone is a 100-year-old technology. It’s time for a change. Charging for phone calls is something you did last century.

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

Colonel Parker asked Henry and me to come to Elvis’ suite and have breakfast. There were at least five policemen stationed up there. He was talking on the telephone.

The perfect PIN is not four digits and not associated with your life, like an old telephone number. It’s something easy for you to remember and hard for other people to guess.

You know, it’s not a given that there is an ‘online’ and ‘offline’ world out there. When you use the telephone, you don’t say that I’m entering some ‘telephono-sphere.’ You don’t say that, and there is no obvious need to say that when you are using a modem.

Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance – the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest.

I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.

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.

My mother worked at the telephone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night. Evenings, she took classes when she could at University of Maryland’s University College, bringing me along to do homework while she studied to get the degree she hoped would offer her and me greater opportunities.

Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn’t in me.

When you look at the light bulb above you, you remember Thomas Alva Edison. When the telephone bell rings, you remember Alexander Graham Bell. Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize. When you see the blue sky, you think of Sir C.V. Raman.

Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?

No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

I started to work at the Colony in March 1958. I remember my first day because the telephone started to ring, and it was Sinatra, three for lunch, his usual table; Onassis, two for lunch, usual table; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Leland Hayward, Truman Capote, all wanting their usual tables.

My brother and I slept on the couch. I didn’t get my own room until I was in college. We didn’t even have a telephone until I was in college.

I’ve been working since I was a child. I worked cutting lawns, delivering newspapers; I was a telephone salesperson; I was a guitar repairman.

It’s just impossible to ignore the activists in your party. These are the people who stuff the envelopes, and walk the precincts, and make the telephone calls, and do all the so-called grunt work that brings about a successful campaign.

There’s nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won’t ring from room service; your mother won’t be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you’re dead.

The utility model of computing – computing resources delivered over the network in much the same way that electricity or telephone service reaches our homes and offices today – makes more sense than ever.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time – the American South in the 1960s and ’70s – when the machine hadn’t completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines – TV, telephone, cars – were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Last night, I had a telephone townhall for my constituents back in Vermont, and we had 11,500 people on it. And I had people on Social Security saying if getting fewer benefits will help us on the debt, they’re for it. And I had a farmer saying that he’s had subsidies for 35 years but we can’t afford them anymore.

For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

I first began to realize that it was time to leave my job when the sight of my manager’s telephone number on my screen made my heart contract and burn.

I can’t sit around and wait for the telephone to ring.

I was nine or 10 years old and my father was sacked on Christmas Day. He was a manager, the results had not been good, he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day, the telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch.

I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

In 1991, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call.

For example, it’s only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn’t have come till 1970.

In general, anyone who paid the long distance telephone tax will get the refund on their 2006 federal income tax return. This includes individuals, businesses and non-profit organizations.

I can do without a television or a telephone, I think.

Telephones are a virtual necessity – not a luxury – and the revenues collected by this tax flow into the general fund. But this once temporary tax remains and costs American taxpayers, our small businesses and families almost $6 billion dollars a year.

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.

Our dream was that someday nobody would talk on a wired telephone. Everybody would talk on a wireless phone.

What we did with this mobile telephone was create a revolution. Before the mobile phone existed we were calling a place, now we are calling a person.

Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio – all these groundbreaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another.

Why doesn’t Apple stop for a year and make medical devices? When people talk about technology, that’s where I start to get a little hot under the collar because I know that it’s the key to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. Having a faster, thinner telephone is not one of the world’s biggest problems.

But then I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I think with the proliferation of mobile devices and then, eventually, the Internet of Things, we literally have supercomputers in our pockets and supercomputers that will hang on telephone poles and in light bulbs.

People’s social networks do not consist only of people they see face to face. In fact, social networks have been extending because of artificial media since the printing press and the telephone.

I learned how to cover race riots by telephone. They didn’t pay me enough at my first newspaper job to venture onto the grounds of South Boston High School when bricks were being thrown. Instead, I would telephone the headmaster and ask him to relay to me the number of broken chairs in the cafeteria each day.

I worked as an accountant in an auditor’s office, at a textile showroom, a telephone booth, and a fast-food joint while studying. My dad found it odd, but he never interfered in any of my decisions.

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.

There is never going to be a substitute for face-to-face communication, but we have seen since the alphabet, to the telephone and now the Internet, that whenever people find a new way to communicate, they will flock to it.

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.

There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II – the first computer it produced for the mass market – many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.

I’m going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I’m naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won’t have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

I watch for emergent technologies and pay attention to what people say they’ll be good for, then see what we actually use them for. It never occurred to me that a tiny telephone with a wireless transceiver would do whatever it is that it’s done to us.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people’s telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

What is special about VOIP is that it’s just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing – or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax – that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

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!

A telephone number shouldn’t represent a home or a car or a restaurant, but instead a person.

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.

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.

You can make a whole album on your telephone, you can make an amazing video too!

When I’m governor… I’ll be the first governor with a listed telephone number.

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.

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.

I think that’s one of the most difficult things in any marriage – in order to build anything, you must be together. You can’t build anything over the telephone.

The telephone call that forever changed the lives of the Dodd family of Chicago came at noon on Thursday, June 8, 1933, as William E. Dodd sat at his desk at the University of Chicago.

Alexander Graham Bell brought us the telephone. He owns the telephones in the buildings. Thomas Edison owns the lightbulb. Whether they took it and did things to improve it, he’s the guy. Now on the dance floor, that belongs to Chubby Checker.

To me, emails are a little bit frustrating. I think that the telephone is much preferred because you get the sound of the voice and the interest and everything else you can’t see in an email.

I grew up in Russia. We had a telephone line, but a load of our neighbours didn’t. It became a shared resource for the whole apartment complex. People would come and knock on the door and ask to call their family in another city.

I’ve suffered from all of the hang-ups known, and none is as bad as the telephone.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That’s what writing is all about.

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

Gossip is nature’s telephone.

The best remote companies I’ve seen do almost everything online, via email and telephone. But they also get together face to face on a regular basis.

If we discovered that we only had 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.

Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.

I stay away from the telephone if at all possible.

You can’t pick up the telephone and say, ‘Connect me with someone else who has a kid with leukemia.’

I don’t want to find myself at the age of 60 waiting by the telephone for someone else to decide if I am capable of being in what might be a crummy TV production.

An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling.

I’m very laid-back, and I meet people just by accident – never through agencies or anything like that. I met Paul Morrissey, who directed me in ‘Dracula’ and ‘Frankenstein,’ on a plane from Rome to Munich. He asked for my telephone number and wrote it in his passport.

There’s all these ways to instantly communicate – cars, computers, telephone and transportation – and even with all that, it’s so hard to find people and have an honest communication with them.

In the World War nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.

Not being allowed to use the Internet is kind of like not being allowed to use a telephone.

Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I’m not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that’s probably more than most.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask – when will we get a road to our village.

We predicted the concept of a telephone that isn’t tied to a wall or a desk. We anticipated that everyone would have a cell phone. We joked that when you’re born you would be assigned a cell phone and if you didn’t answer you had died.

I really only eat burritos in Tijuana from street corners that come out of coolers from businesses with no name, telephone or website.

Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.

It’s a dialogue, not a monologue, and some people don’t understand that. Social media is more like a telephone than a television.

I use Postmates more than I use the actual telephone app on my phone.

I was working at the telephone company in the late ’80s as a service representative.

I go through my day remembering things like telephone cords.

Changes like the telephone and telegraphy, which tend to reduce the cost of organizing spatially, will tend to increase the size of the firm.

I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio, the telephone, Facebook – each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn’t. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I’m concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.

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?

I think that what we should do is have short, clipped conversations on the telephone so someone can always get us, not talking about inane stuff and having someone trying to get you. I also think we’ve just got to be more sensitive toward other people and not call them at night if you know they’ve been working.

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.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn’t a profession, it’s a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you’re all set.

America’s best buy is a telephone call to the right man.

I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

Wisdom cannot come by railroad or automobile or aeroplane, or be hurried up by telegraph or telephone.

Protecting consumers goes beyond just fighting illicit schemes. It also involves making sure that they get what they pay for. Unfortunately, rural telephone customers aren’t always assured of that.

I don’t think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn’t surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?

Internet users should be able to choose where to go online and which applications to use. Comcast, say, shouldn’t be allowed to block Skype just because it could siphon the communications giant’s telephone business.

A telephone survey says that 51 percent of college students drink until they pass out at least once a month. The other 49 percent didn’t answer the phone.

Your insurance broker has your telephone number, but your insurance broker doesn’t have your Facebook ID. I think they are very different modes of communication. Commingling them can come with risk and peril.