"People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were"
About this Quote
Murrow’s line lands like a dry martini: crisp, cold, and a little mean on purpose. It flips a familiar lament - “conversation is a lost art” - into a wish for its extinction, a reversal that exposes what polite nostalgia usually hides. The joke isn’t that people can’t talk anymore; it’s that they won’t stop. Murrow isn’t mourning silence. He’s craving it.
As a journalist who spent his life around microphones, public statements, and the theater of authority, Murrow understood that speech is often performance rather than exchange. The quote carries the weariness of someone who has heard too many confident monologues dressed up as dialogue: the cocktail-party sermon, the bureaucratic deflection, the self-important anecdote, the televised “discussion” that’s really a boxing match with better suits. His wish isn’t anti-social so much as anti-noise. He’s attacking chatter as a kind of cultural pollution - talk that fills space to avoid thought, talk that turns social life into an endurance test.
The subtext is also about power. In Murrow’s era, mass media was accelerating, and “conversation” was becoming less intimate and more strategic: messaging, spin, the early architecture of the sound bite. When everyone is talking, the hard thing is listening; when conversation becomes a status display, sincerity becomes inefficient. Murrow’s wit works because it’s not just curmudgeonly. It’s diagnostic: a warning that a society can drown in words and still starve for meaning.
As a journalist who spent his life around microphones, public statements, and the theater of authority, Murrow understood that speech is often performance rather than exchange. The quote carries the weariness of someone who has heard too many confident monologues dressed up as dialogue: the cocktail-party sermon, the bureaucratic deflection, the self-important anecdote, the televised “discussion” that’s really a boxing match with better suits. His wish isn’t anti-social so much as anti-noise. He’s attacking chatter as a kind of cultural pollution - talk that fills space to avoid thought, talk that turns social life into an endurance test.
The subtext is also about power. In Murrow’s era, mass media was accelerating, and “conversation” was becoming less intimate and more strategic: messaging, spin, the early architecture of the sound bite. When everyone is talking, the hard thing is listening; when conversation becomes a status display, sincerity becomes inefficient. Murrow’s wit works because it’s not just curmudgeonly. It’s diagnostic: a warning that a society can drown in words and still starve for meaning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|
More Quotes by Edward
Add to List
