Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakarov, mentions this quotation in an article she has just now published.

The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of a million is statistics.
- Josef Stalin

Just a trivial observation here, but shouldn't it be "death of a million is a statistic"?

We have three quotation threads going now, and I wasn't quite sure where to put this. However, I will let Cam have her own thread, and the old quote thread was getting a bit long anyway....so I used this one.

I was reading a Forbes magazine today that had a lot of quotes about words and speech. I picked out my favorites:

Given my love of Winston Churchill:
Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances. If Churchill had had a speech writer in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today." ~ James Humes

It's a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney? ~ Eileen Atkins

People resent articulacy, as if articulacy were a form of vice. ~ Frederic Raphael
[Do you agree?]

I love this one :
I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make certain they are still going. ~ Lord Birkett

Perhaps this is one for me???
Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent. ~ Dionysius The Elder