Quotes About Language

For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark.

Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion "natives." The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it.

Let us be honest, the colonist knows perfectly well that no jargon is a substitute for reality.

Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand.

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force.

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force. The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

Then your words of abuse today may turn into a universally valid principle of denigration, for words are magical formulae. They leave fingermarks behind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye becomes the footprints of history. One ought to watch one's every word.

All language is but a poor translation.

In Arabic linguistic usage, we are told, the interpretation of "water" as knowledge is confirmed by the common fi gure of speech that calls a man of vast knowledge an "ocean." Moreover, the comparison of water and knowledge suggests that just as those who would sail the sea without a ship would drown in it, those who look for knowledge among those who do not have it will perish.

Love is only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of death. Thus the white peoples of the world foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customs have lost their living power.

Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.

When we learn new words and ideas, and then begin to see them everywhere, the world is suddenly more legible and more vivid. Language reveals to us what was always there, but to what before we may have simply passed over, we now feel intimately connected.1 —Meara Sharma

Ack Acka Dak Dak Daka Ack

It's like learning a language you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

He became what his language made him.

cercava di sostituire la parola scrivania con la parola tavolo … in scrivania sentiva prigionia, agonia, tirannia. Mentre in tavolo sentiva il fruscio di un refolo, il sibilo del volo. Tavolo fluttuava, scrivania no.

Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous.

The Prison-House of Language