Quotes on language
Words want to be free!
Unknown, Author
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Murrow, Edward R.
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
Unknown, Author
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.
Fischer, Martin H.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Adams, Henry
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Johnson, Samuel
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Samuel Butler
The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
Lawrence, D.H.
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
Wagner, Jane
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Jones, Franklin P.
We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
Adams, Abigail
The PC [political correctness] movement exists not in order to improve the well-being of those whose oppression it purports to combat. Rather, its purpose is to wrap its proponents in a kind of verbal comfort-blanket. Beneath its complacent cosiness and nauseating sanctimony, the intrepid shock-troops of 'populist authoritarianism' pretend that suppressing the language of prejudice is the same as eliminating prejudice itself. Smug and self-satisfied, having assuaged whatever guilt they may have felt through their attacks on the 'non-PC', they ignore the real inequalities, ignominies and powerlessness of those whom they pretend to champion. They are instead complacently content at their 'victory' in contorting the language of 'acceptable' discourse in the classroom, in the textbook and in the mass media.
Kowal, Erik
A different language is a different vision of life.
Fellini, Federico
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Orwell, George
The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.
Twain, Mark
Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
Amidon, Mark
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
Samuel Butler
One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.
Smith, Kevin