Quotes About Language

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

Their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word.

Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.

But Socco, Mustafa Ali said. If there ain't no black people really and they ain't no white people then how come you still usin' them words? Because them words still usin' me, brother Ali. They usin' me like a mothahfuckah.

The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt.

language. His idea of an investigation had more to do with conquest than it did with intelligence.

The sights and sentiments that attend civil conflict, are of a kind to reconcile the human heart, however generous and humane by nature, to severe language and cruel actions.

But it is wonderful what mischief may be done by only two words

Accounting numbers, of course, are the language of business and as such are of enormous help to anyone evaluating the worth of a business and tracking its progress. Charlie and I would be lost without these numbers: they invariably are the starting point for us in evaluating our own businesses and those of others. Managers and owners need to remember, however, that accounting is but an aid to business thinking, never a substitute for it.

If you can't communicate, it's like winking at a girl in the dark.

We say, 'I see what you mean,' it's the metaphor for clarity. But sometimes I wish people could see the pictures in my head, instead of my having to describe them with words. Words are clumsy. I wish I could communicate in pictures.

The words I AM are your sacred identification as God- your highest self. Take care how you use this terms because saying anything after I AM that's incongruent with God is really taking the Lord's name in vain!

Actually now I'm remembering that the goodbye chow isn't spelled that way. It's ciao or something weird like that. It's Italian, right? But I'm not an Italian gypsy, I'm a hungry gypsy. So spelling it chow makes total sense.)

It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

The road is a word, conceived elsewhere and laid across the country in the wound prepared for it: a word made concrete and thrust among us.

The language that reveals also obscures.

This habit of using words which have no definite meaning is very convenient to writers, but very much the reverse for readers. [What is Darwinism (New York, 1874), p. 21]

Wherever men exist, in all ages and in all parts of the world, they have some form of religion. The idea of God is impressed on every human language. And as language is the product and revelation of human consciousness, if all languages have some name for God, it proves that the idea of God, in some from, belongs to every human being.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

She had students read their compositions aloud so that everyone could hear how good writing had three Cs: clarity, coherence, and cadence.

IN DEFENSE OF THE F-WORD I am sure there is a special place in heaven reserved for those who have never used the F-word. I will never get near that place.

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.

Terror attacks are now 'man-caused disasters.' And the 'global war on terror' is no more. It is an 'overseas contingency operation.' Nidal Hassan proudly tells a military court that he, a soldier of Allah, killed 13 American soldiers in the name of jihad. but the massacre remains officially classified as an act not of terrorism but of 'workplace violence.