Quotes About Language

What if there were no hypothetical questions?

You take 5 white guys and you take 5 black guys and put em together for a week and what you won't have is 5 blacks guys talking like, 'Golly gee, we really won that big basketball game' but you will have 5 white guys talking like 'Yo slick, whuzzup...we be shootin hoops and mad playin, slammed those mofos

Here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if 2 planes almost collide, it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss. [WHAM! CRUNCH!] Look, they nearly missed! Yes, but not quite.

Political correctness is America's newest form of intolerance, and it is especially pernicious because it comes disguised as tolerance. It presents itself as fairness, yet attempts to restrict and control people's language with strict codes and rigid rules. I'm not sure that's the way to fight discrimination. I'm not sure silencing people or forcing them to alter their speech is the best method for solving problems that go much deeper than speech.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?

Is there another word for synonym?

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

You can prick your finger ... Just don't finger your prick.

There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions, and wooooords.

Why do we park on driveways and drive on parkways? Just to be silly!

Griddle cakes, pancakes, hot cakes, flapjacks: why are there four names for grilled batter and only one word for love?

Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.

Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a...secret; You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that. Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.

The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I think is important. Words are my work, they're my play. They're my passion. Words are all we have really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. And, then we assign a word to a thought and we're stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. The same words that hurt can heal.

Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts but thoughts are fluid. Then we assign a word to a thought and we're stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think that the same words that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them.

The term faith-based is nothing more than an attempt to slip religion past you when you're not thinking; which is the way religion is always slipped past you. It deprives you of choice; choice being another word the political-speech manipulators find extremely useful.

I get tired of people talking about ''bad words'' and ''bad language''. Bullshit! It's the context that makes them good or bad.

Today, I want to tell you about little Danny Pendejo.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.

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.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our good will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.