Quotes About Language

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

You can make something mean anything you want. And you can spend a great deal of time and effort choosing your words and allusions and quotations carefully and hardly anyone will even notice or get it anyway.

For all the intrinsic meaning of the word kilometer, we might just as well say that "we're moving toward Leo at three pizzas and a cabbage per walrus.

and use the uttermost effort of our mind to purify them of the limitations that arise in them from our limitation. That is the way of advance for the mind. Human language is not adequate to utter God, but it is the highest we have and we should use its highest words.

One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.?

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk in order to provide articles for people who can't read.

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.

How can something as fragile as a word build the whole world?

The beach has a language of its own, with its undulating ribbons of silt, the imponderable hieroglyphs of bird tracks. The receding waves catch on innumerable holes in the sand. Bubbles form and fade. A new language, with a new alphabet...

Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.

In every language, labels for adulterous women are far worse than those for similarly adventurous men. When a woman is a "a slut," a man is merely a skirt chaser.

Unjustified linguistic barriers fragment the unity with which nature presents us.

Verbal labeling is not part of emotions communication. Language helps us discuss sentiments, but it doesn't play much of a role in how they are generated, expressed, or felt. Yet modern emotion research has placed language front and center.

Since we routinely express ideas and feelings in language, we may be forgiven for assigning a role to it, but isn't it remarkable how often we struggle to find our words? It's not that we don't know what we thought or felt, but we just can't put our verbal finger on it. This would of course be wholly unnecessary if thoughts and feelings were linguistic products to begin with. In that case, we'd expect a waterfall of words!

At international meetings, Americans and Brits often mistake the extraordinary privilege of being able to speak in their mother tongue for intellectual superiority. Because no one is going to disagree with them in broken English, they are rarely disabused of this notion.

Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.

there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.