Quotes About Language

Science is the international language, so when we are able to convince countries that good decision-making for human health and animal health is based upon science, that's a real success story for us.

The intelligence community is governed by the same legal and ethical standards as the rest of American government and society, but an operational imperative is here, too. An intelligence community charged with global responsibilities cannot be successful without diversity of thought, culture and language.

Speaking fluent English - like doing long division or successfully rewiring a 220-volt electrical outlet - is not a skill you're born with. It's something you learn, occasionally even by opening some old dictionary.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

I don't think there is such a thing as an idea without words, because your language is your thought.

Learning how to rap actually improved my English, because it forced me to talk fast, and I used to suck at that.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute.

I can understand that there are those who can think and imagine the world without words, but I think that once you find the words that name your experience, then suddenly that experience becomes grounded, and you can use it and you can try to understand it.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

As a medical doctor, I have known the face of adversity. I have seen much of death and dying, suffering and sorrow. I also remember the plight of students overwhelmed by their studies and of those striving to learn a foreign language. And I recall the fatigue and frustration felt by young parents with children in need.

Hip hop is usually a bunch of guys talking to a bunch of guys, in my experience. It's homosocial, not homosexual, in that it's almost always all one gender in a room where it's being created. That locker-room environment has an impact on the language. I think the music suffers 'cause it allows an almost cartoonish level of misogyny.

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

Many people suggest using mathematics to talk to the aliens, and Dutch computer scientist Alexander Ollongren has developed an entire language (Lincos) based on this idea. But my personal opinion is that mathematics may be a hard way to describe ideas like love or democracy.

We have found that companies need to speak a common language because some of the suggested ways to harness disruptive innovation are seemingly counterintuitive. If companies don't have that common language, it is hard for them to come to consensus on a counterintuitive course of action.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

Seppuku is Japanese for ritual suicide. I thought, What a cute name for a coat.

I was always told that the Premier League would suit my playing style, and England has always attracted me. Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to come here so much so that I learned the language, so I was preparing myself in some way for a future move to England.

Records have never really been my strong suit. I've always been a much better live act. I didn't understand the language of the studio. You sing differently in a studio. The language, the craft - it's just a whole different deal. I avoided the problem on my first record by doing a live album.