Words are our servants, not our masters.

If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner...if I let it slip from my tongue, I am ITS prisoner.

It's the damage that we do and never know. It's the words that we don't say that scare me so.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Words, too, are a type of combat, for we always become what we refuse to say.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Nothing haunts us like the things we don't say.

Where do the words go
when we have said them?

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.

We're not really free unless we can put matters in our own words. And if we can't put them in our own words, we can't talk to other people, because if we speak the words of the internet or the TV news, other people will recognize that, and they are not really in our company, but somewhere else.

It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.

[W]e talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important, and sounds well. As we are not particular about the meaning of our liveries on state occassions, if they be but fine and numerous enough, so, the meaning or necessity of our words is a secondary consideration, if there be but a great parade of them. And as individuals get into trouble by making too great a show of liveries, or as slaves when they are too numerous rise against their masters, so I think I could mention a nation that has got into many great difficulties, and will get into many greater, from maintaining too large a retinue of words.

Often, we use words in a damaging way not because we are bad people but simply because we are not paying attention. No one ever taught us how powerful words really are.

we are all prisoners of our thoughts.