Powell Communication Quotes

Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

The genius of communication is the ability to be both totally honest and totally kind at the same time. —John Powell, The Secret of Staying in Love

She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour.

Having a friend who provides the needed atmosphere for free emotional communication is an invaluable help to vision therapy and personal growth.

Donald Trump repeatedly promised he would hire "the best people." He did not. That is not my opinion; it is President Trump's, which he expresses frequently. Trump has said that his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, was "dumb as a rock" and "lazy as hell." His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was "scared stiff and Missing in Action," "didn't have a clue," and "should be ashamed of himself." Trump described one of his assistants, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as "wacky," "deranged," "vicious, but not smart," a "crazed, crying lowlife," and finally a "dog." After lasting only eleven days as communications director, Anthony Scaramucci "was quickly terminated 'from' a position that he was totally incapable of handling" and was called "very much out of control." An anonymous adviser to the president was called "a drunk/drugged-up loser." Chief strategist Steve Bannon was "sloppy," a "leaker," and "dumped like a dog by almost everyone." His longtime lawyer Michael Cohen was "TERRIBLE," "hostile," "a convicted liar & fraudster," and a "failed lawyer." The president was "Never a big fan!" of his White House counsel Don McGahn and "not even a little bit happy" with Jerome Powell, his selection to head the Federal Reserve, whom he called an "enemy." His third national security advisor, John Bolton, was mocked as a "tough guy [who] got us into Iraq." When the president was irritated with his former chief of staff, John Kelly, the president's press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, declared that Kelly "was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great president.

Whether you communicate God’s Word, recruit others to teach, plan a life-altering youth retreat, lead a neighbor to Christ, or give toward a missionary’s support, what you do produces waves of grace that keep expanding—all the way to eternity!

I taught for 16 years at William and Mary and six years at George Washington University, using as one of my principal text books David Roth's book Running the World. And if you look on — if memory doesn't fail me — about page 12 of the hardback copy of that book, you'll find his five circumstances that influence National Security decision making thus the NSC. Two of them that are prominent, one was absolutely prominent with my boss Colin Powell, are the people doing the decision-making: the characters as David calls them. The depth of their character, the shallow of their character, whatever. Another one though is domestic politics. As I taught my classes on both campuses over the years, my students grew more and more strident, in their assertion in their case studies using this framework for analysis David offers, at saying that the domestic outweighed everything else, and I started paying attention to them. And I started looking at it closely myself, and I think they had a point we are now to that point to your question where nothing that is rational about national security foreign policy, international relations, or the associated fields, is accomplished on the basis of national interest. It's accomplished on the basis of these people's views of their chances in the political arena, and that's where we are today almost without exception. [...] those are the other three things in David's framework for analysis. Ideology slash governing philosophy — and he differentiates those two things, sometimes they blend, of course almost always they blend, but he differentiates them. And then the next one is the structure or process in which the decisions made. Because he was a member of the NSC staff, and he saw often, as did I, the statutory system didn't being used. Dick Cheney just totally ignored the statutory system and made his own decisions in his own office, and communicated them to New York Times so they could be on the front page above the fold right side the next morning. And then we added one. We added one called "budget". And I showed him that Dwight Eisenhower was the very last president to require his (then it was called the office of the budget, OMB now) budget director to give him an assessment of every National Security decision he formerly made, if it incurred cost, and most often it did. We haven't had that since Eisenhower. Nobody cares anymore. The latest one to be asked that by the budget director, by the director of The Office of Management Budget in a formal meeting of the principles, Dick Cheney said: "Ronald Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and we went on from there. (Excerpt from interview "US Elections & Imperial Overstretch - Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen")

As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell’s alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company’s 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, “We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy…Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.” Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies “equal time” to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed.

... I hope I can communicate with people nonetheless. My writing is an attempt to join an ongoing human conversation that starts with the questions: Why are we here? What do we want? And how can we contribute? I hope that by writing some of the stories I know, people will hear some of their own voices in my characters. -- "Witnessing Hope" by Stephanie Powell Watts

A doctor might say, “There’s a chance your mother could recover from her pneumonia if we put her on the breathing tube and send her to the ICU.” A chance? That sounds great! A more accurate statement might be something like this: “We could put your mother in the ICU on a breathing tube. I don’t recommend that, because she will suffer, without likely benefit. The tube is so uncomfortable she will have to be sedated, so she can’t communicate with you. She may get restrained so she doesn’t pull out the tube. If she gets through this pneumonia, she will be weaker than before, and more likely to get sick again. This pneumonia signals she is in the final phase of dementia. I recommend that you consider hospice care and a do-not-hospitalize order, focusing on comfort care without the pain and trauma of repeated transfers as she grows weaker.” A family member will have a clearer picture of how this treatment fits into the larger scenario of old age, dementia, and frailty.