Quotes About Language

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

He replies nothing but monosyllables. I believe he would make three bites of a cherry.

Speak after the manner of men.

Speech is the index of the mind.

Style is the dress of thoughts.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Tears are the silent language of grief.

Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.

The English of the Bible has a pithiness and raciness, a homely tang, a terse sententiousness, an idiomatic flavour which comes home to men's business and bosoms ... a nobility of diction and ... a rhythmic quality . . . unrivaled in its beauty.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, "No bablo ingles."

Today violence is the rhetoric of the period.

Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.

A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words.

Words that weep, and tears that speak.

But words once spoke can never be recall'd.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

Words will build no walls.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical.