Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are Utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli's Prince, a Utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot.

Noise is evolving not only the endurers of noise but the needers of noise.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears as easily as we open and shut our mouths.

He who sleeps in continual noise is awakened by silence.

But ice-crunching and loud gum-chewing, together with drumming on tables, and whistling the same tune 70 times in succession, because they indicate an indifference on the part of the perpetrator to the rest of the world in general, are not only registered on the delicate surfaces of the brain but eat little holes in it until it finally collapses or blows up.

For children is there any happiness which is not also noise?

We like no noise unless we make it ourselves.