Quotes About Language

Never say more than is necessary.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

My favourite city is Moscow, because of its history, which I find fascinating. As I learned to speak Russian, it made it even more interesting.

If every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust,[Adolf] Hitler's attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history.

It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.

A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

In my world, history comes down to language and art.

In the history of the concept of number has been adjective (three cows, three monads) and noun (three, pure and simple), and now ... number seems to be more like a verb (to triple).

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

The history of a culture can be determined by its untranslatable words.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

Only a fraction of the history of literacy has been typographic.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

Words are the weights which hold our history in place.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Well named, Quotology contains everything you always wanted to know about quotations, quoters, quotees, quotation books, 'quoox' (quotations out of context), and their fascinating history.