Quotes About Language

Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

If you wanted lesbians to come to a discussion, too, it might be better not to call your group the Gay Men's Group.

lately a scholar at Eton, who aroused everyone's suspicions by knowing Latin and Greek [at the Billing trial, the judge made a point of not knowing any Greek, and disparaged those who did]

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

beginning of the twentieth century), though the number of people learning the language has shown an increase in recent years. The 2001 censu

In Wales, only about one in five inhabitants can speak Welsh (down from one in

I even, to my own amusement if no one else's, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

A deconstructed text is tantamount to a forgery.

My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -- no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!

Tears shed with real sincerity foster an instant and powerful connection with the Creator. In a sense, they are an especially powerful kind of prayer that expresses itself beyond the limits of language.

The noun 'spirituality' in the Middle Ages simply meant the clergy. Subsequently it first appeared in reference to 'the spiritual life' during the 17th century. It disappeared for a time but re-established itself at the end of the 19th century in French, of which the modern English word 'spirituality' is a translation.

For grammar it [poetry] might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man shoult be put to school to learn his mother-tongue.

Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active.

At bottom, it is the sound of the divine spark within us all. Like the cry of a child or the howl of a wolf, it transcends language and culture.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me—'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.

You ask a philosopher a question and after he or she has talked for a bit, you don't understand your question any more.

En France, des centaines de milliers de personnes défilent pour défendre l'école privée, qu'ils appellent l'école libre. La captation, l'usurpation de cet adjectif me rend fou. Ma conscience politique s'éveille.

On sent que cela monte, que l'explosion de colère est proche. Il dit qu'il n'admet pas l'emploi du « on ». Quoi ? « On » va guérir ? Qui ? Elle ? Elle est malade ? C'est quoi ce besoin biscornu de s'approprier un mal qui n'est pas le sien, dont elle ne sait rien ou presque, dont elle ne mourra pas ?

What the old man senses is that the tone of Monsieur Bark's voice denotes sadness, a deep melancholy, a sort of wound the voice accentuates, which accompanies it beyond words and language, something that infuses it just as the sap infuses a tree without one seeing it.