Quotes About Language

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language, and not the English language.

It was Ronald Reagan who used to say that the 10 most frightening words in the English language are, "I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help."

Sometimes the government has to answer questions with ambiguous language.

Bureaucrats are the only people in the world who can say absolutely nothing and mean it.

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.

Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It's the same thing.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

You know, we have main English language parties, federalist parties, and traditionally the ones to watch would be the Conservatives, who form the government, and then the Liberals.

As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.

Words are like eggs dropped from great heights; you can no more call them back than ignore the mess they leave when they fall.

Man's great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

Sometimes, when something really great happens to me, I like to wait two weeks before I tell anyone about it, because I like to use the word 'fortnight'.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English language.

Not only every great poet, but every genuine, but lesser poet, fulfils once for all some possibility of language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors.

I don't ever want to stop learning. And I really want to learn French fluently. It would be great to go and live in France.

I'm not a great poetry fan.

That amenity which the French have developed into a great art . . . conversation.

I have trouble sometimes watching actors - even when they do a great job - with an accent.

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.

The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.