122 quotes about Language
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The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
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I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
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Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
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If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
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Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
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No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
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Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
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Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
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The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
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The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
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There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
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It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
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To have another language is to possess a second soul.
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I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
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If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.
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Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
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One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.
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Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
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As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'Tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room
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To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
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The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
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And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?
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Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
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It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
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Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.
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The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
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Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
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There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
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The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
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Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries.
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The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
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I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
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Language is the archives of history.
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Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
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The language of truth is simple.
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I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
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The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.
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Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
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Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.
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Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
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It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
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Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.
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If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.
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The eyes have one language everywhere.
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After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?
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Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
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The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
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Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.
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Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
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Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
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To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.
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Language is the pedigree of nations.
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Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.
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Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.
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I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
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Language is the dress of thought.
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Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.
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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
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Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
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Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
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Language is the inventory of human experience.
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Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
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No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.
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Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
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Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
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An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
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Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
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There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!
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Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
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Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.
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The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.
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The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.
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To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
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The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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