Daily Inspiration Quote by Deborah Bull

Spoken language gets all the credit, but Deborah Bull is reminding you that the real argument often happens in the margins: the pause that lands like a verdict, the torso that pulls away mid-sentence, the smile that never reaches the eyes. As a dancer, she speaks from a profession where meaning is engineered through posture, timing, and weight distribution. Her claim isn’t just that bodies communicate; it’s that bodies leak.

The “before we had speech” move does two things at once. It gives her point evolutionary muscle (this isn’t taste, it’s wiring), and it quietly undercuts the modern fantasy that we’re purely rational creatures who can talk our way out of what we’re feeling. The “apparently, 80%” statistic reads like a conversational mic drop - a number meant less to be audited than to re-balance the listener’s attention. Even if the percentage is slippery, the rhetorical function is clear: stop treating words as the whole truth.

In context, coming from a dancer, it’s also a defense of an art form that’s often dismissed as decorative. Bull is arguing that movement isn’t an accessory to meaning; it’s the oldest technology for transmitting it. The subtext is a warning, too: if most understanding is nonverbal, then power flows to those who can read rooms - and to those trained to perform confidence, calm, attraction, authority. Body language becomes a social currency, and like any currency, it can be spent honestly or counterfeited.