Quotes About Language

I was a Southerner and had the map of Dixie on my tongue.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Dad. Jacen. Coruscant. Answers. I don't like it that you can win an argument without using verbs.

Happy, for instance, once meant luck. Not good luck or bad, just luck. Look what we have done to ourselves. We think we can actually pursue happiness.

Usually we regard as meaningful that which can be expressed, and as meaningless that which cannot be expressed. Yet, the equation of the meaningful and the expressible ignores a vast realm of human experience, and is refuted by our sense of the ineffable which is an awareness of an allusiveness to meaning without the ability to express it.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

So far, Maimonides had penned all his writings and letters in the Arabic which the Jews in Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and Persia were using at that time. However, like nearly all Jewish–Arabic authors, he employed the Hebrew alphabet.

The self-control of passion, the reshaping of his image of the world, the elimination of the sense of merit, the change of language, the effect of his profession on the structure of his life, all hint at the depth of this crisis.

to employ words is not the same as to understand what they mean. Moreover, the relation between words and their meanings is elastic. Words remain, while meanings are subject to change.

Muziek, poëzie, religie - ze ontstaan allemaal in de ontmoeting van de ziel met een aspect van de werkelijkheid waarvoor de rede geen begrippen en geen taal heeft. (p.56)

The act of revelation is a mystery, while the record of revelation is a literary fact, phrased in the language of man.

Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Demagoguery is the ability to dress minor ideas with major words.

Lincoln characterized Stephen Douglas's argument as a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.

If the do has the can, and the ifs possess the butts, then the has can can the can in the if's butt, and the delicate walnut shell that is the universe shall be sundered, and the Prepositional Pronouns will break free from their shackles, and the when's shall rule the world

Before anything else, we have to say that President Jimmy Carter was a stand-up guy who had the misfortune of having a less than qualified interpreter with him. When Carter, on a visit to Poland, made a speech saying he wanted to know their people's "desires for the future," his interpreter wrongly said that President Carter desired Poland sexually.

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.

to speak, as Leopold's officials did, of forced laborers as libérés, or "liberated men," was to use language as perverted as that above the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei.

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River's mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

A Minnesota pastor was tarred and feathered because people overheard him praying in German with a dying woman.

As 1917 wore on, antiwar rallies drew larger crowds. Charlotte Despard and several other women formed a new organization, the Women's Peace Crusade. "I should like the words 'alien' and 'foreigner' to be banished from the language," she said in one speech. "We are all members of the same family.