77 Tacit Quotes

Following is our list of tacit quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

Quick Jump To

Famous Tacit Quotes

Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent. — Thomas Hobbes

Your silence gives consent. — Plato

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto! - Robert Burns

Learn taciturnity and let that be your motto! — Robert Burns

Without tact you can learn nothing. Tact teaches you when to be silent. Inquirers who are always questioning never learn anything. — Benjamin Disraeli

Silence is argument carried out by other means. - Che Guevara

Silence is argument carried out by other means. — Che Guevara

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading. - Sarah Orne Jewett

Tact is after all a kind of mind reading. — Sarah Orne Jewett

The unspoken word never does harm. - Lajos Kossuth

The unspoken word never does harm. — Lajos Kossuth

Saying nothing... sometimes says the most. - Emily Dickinson

Saying nothing... sometimes says the most. — Emily Dickinson

A Conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words. — John Lennon

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. - Will Durant

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. — Will Durant

The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need for words, and ask no more than complicitous silence. — Pierre Bourdieu

I shall assume that your silence gives consent. — Plato

Speaking comes by nature, silence by understanding. — Proverbs

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression. — Mark Helprin

Sometimes one creates a dynamic impression by saying something, and sometimes one creates as significant an impression by remaining silent. — Dalai Lama

Short Tacit Quotes

  • We know more than we can tell. — Michael Polanyi
  • Any warning normally implies, even if it is tacit, that there should be changes — Steven Biko
  • The laissez-faire argument relies on the same tacit appeal to perfection as does communism. — George Soros
  • Conventionality is the tacit agreement to set appearances before reality, form before content. — Ellen Key
  • As long as one accepts "time" tacitly as such he is dreaming a dream, not living a life. — Wei Wu Wei
  • No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. — Alfred North Whitehead
  • Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. — Susan Sontag
  • Fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true. — Marilynne Robinson

Tacit Image Quotes

Tacitus Quotes

You're only delaying the inevitable. I have the Tacitus. I am invincible. The Tacitus told me of Tiberium missiles, of invulnerable flying ships, of real-time genetic mutation. More than alien. More than human! The next step in our evolution as a species! — Unknown Author

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar -- that I call an achievement. — G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. — Seamus Heaney

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement. — Horace

To live without having a Cicero and a Tacitus at hand seems to me as if it was aprivation of one of my limbs. — John Quincy Adams

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them. — Edward Gibbon

I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier. — Thomas Jefferson

All preceptors should have that kind of genius described by Tacitus, "equal to their business, but not above it;" a patient industry, with competent erudition; a mind depending more on its correctness than its originality, and on its memory rather than on its invention. — Charles Caleb Colton

Tacitus has written an entire work on the manners of the Germans. This work is short, but it comes from the pen of Tacitus, who was always concise, because he saw everything at a glance. — Tacitus

People Writing About Tacit

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Plato

Plato
quotes on life, love and reality

945 13426
Read quotes by Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes
quotes on government, human nature and absolute monarchy

243 2437
Read quotes by Robert Burns

Robert Burns
quotes on friendship, family and death

187 2284
Read quotes by Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli
quotes on leadership, youth and democracy

560 5142
Read quotes by Che Guevara

Che Guevara
quotes on education, revolution and love

168 13021
Read quotes by Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett
quotes on religion, education and life

53 202

More Tacit Quotes

Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it. — Pierre Bourdieu

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote. — David Foster Wallace

Gentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? — Susan B. Anthony

While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable. — Michael Polanyi

Suppose someone sits down where you are sitting right now and announces to me that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. The last thing I want to do with him is to get involved in a technical discussion of cavalry tactics at the Battle of Austerlitz. If I do that, I'm getting tacitly drawn into the game that he is Napoleon Bonaparte. — Robert Solow

Still,[...] in all forms of comics the sequential artist relies upon the tacit cooperation of the reader. This cooperation is based upon the convention of reading and the common cognitive disciplines. Indeed, it is this very voluntary cooperation, so unique to comics, that underlies the contract between artist and audience. — Will Eisner

Usually a person relates to another under the tacit assumption thatthe other shares his view of reality, that indeed there is only onereality. — Paul Watzlawick

There are no impediments now to corporations. None. And what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction. — Chris Hedges

Beware of "the real world". A speaker's apeal to it is always an invitation not to challenge his tacit assumptions. — Edsger Dijkstra

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him. — Aldous Huxley

Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowleadge down in plans. — Barry Boehm

Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment. — Michael Polanyi

Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. — William F. Buckley, Jr.

Money doesn't mind if we say it's evil, it goes from strength to strength. It's a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy. — Martin Amis

Revolutionary constituencies always involve a tacit alliance between the least alienated and the most oppressed. — David Graeber

The silence of a friend commonly amounts to treachery. His not daring to say anything in our behalf implies a tacit censure. — William Hazlitt

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. — Karl Kraus

There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped'; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief. — Graham Greene

True values are not taught and declared, they evolve through the acts and interaction of the living, they are understood at a near tacit level by those who live them. — Dave Snowden

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back. — Mignon McLaughlin

Some theists in evolutionary science acquiesce to these tacit rules and retain a personal faith while accepting a thoroughly naturalistic picture of physical reality. — Phillip E. Johnson

The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West. — Che Guevara

(Politeness is) a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not be made the subject of reproach. — Arthur Schopenhauer

At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts. — George Orwell

In prayer we call ourselves 'worms of the dust', but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par. — Mark Twain

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. This is why most news about government sounds as if it were federally mandated -- serious, bulky and blandly worthwhile, like a high-fiber diet set in type. — P. J. O'Rourke

The National Rifle Association is a domestic terrorist organization that tacitly supports the killing of children more than it supports reasoned gun legislation. — Richard Ford

In the end, many of his more militant colleagues began to feel that [Ho Chi Minh's] tendency to compromise, and his reluctance to confront the enemy directly, was a sign of weakness. The decision to confront the United States in 1963-1965 was a tacit recognition that Ho's approach had failed. — William J. Duiker

A conspiracy theorist is a person who tacitly admits that they have insufficient data to prove their points. A conspiracy is a battle cry of a person with insufficient data. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

One can speak of an alterity of desire - a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires. — Jean Baudrillard

From the outset, however, this whole controversy has been plagued by tacit assumptions, very often of a philosophical rather than a physical character. — David Bohm

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor. — Adam Smith

The Nuremberg Trial of the German war criminals was tacitly based on the recognition of the principle: criminal actions cannot be excused if committed on government orders; conscience supersedes the authority of the law of the state. — Albert Einstein

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. — Steven Pinker

The reason child care is such a loaded issue is that when we talk about it, we are always tacitly talking about motherhood. And when we're talking about motherhood we're always tacitly assuming that child care must be a very dim second to full-time mother care. — Anna Quindlen

War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting interests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man. — Germaine Greer

The idea that people can behave naturally, without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical rules. — Judith Martin

Marriage is a sort of tacit hunting in couples. The world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests and stewing in its own little privacy - it's the most repulsive thing in the world. One's got to get rid of the exclusiveness of married love. — Susan Sontag

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former. — Karl Kraus

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of tacit quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about tacit to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of tacit quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage