Quotes on language
Words want to be free!
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Author Unknown Quotes
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
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Edward R. Murrow Quotes
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication.
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Author Unknown Quotes
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool.
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Martin H. Fischer Quotes
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
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Henry Adams Quotes
What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same.
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Antonio Porchia Quotes
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
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Samuel Johnson Quotes
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
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Derek Walcott Quotes
The quantity of consonants in the English language is constant. If omitted in one place, they turn up in another. When a Bostonian "pahks" his "cah," the lost r's migrate southwest, causing a Texan to "warsh" his car and invest in "erl wells."
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Author Unknown Quotes
Learn a new language and get a new soul.
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Czech Proverb Quotes
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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Samuel Butler Quotes
If you can speak three languages you're trilingual. If you can speak two languages you're bilingual. If you can speak only one language you're an American.
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Author Unknown Quotes
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.
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D.H. Lawrence Quotes
Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us.
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Julia Penelope Quotes
Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.
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Martin H. Fischer Quotes
I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
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Jane Wagner Quotes
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
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Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
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Franklin P. Jones Quotes
Let's not become so worried about not offending anybody that we lose the ability to distinguish between respect and paranoia.
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Larry King Quotes
We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.
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Abigail Adams Quotes
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.
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Erik Kowal Quotes
A different language is a different vision of life.
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Federico Fellini Quotes
I like the word "indolence." It makes my laziness seem classy.
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Bern Williams Quotes
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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George Orwell Quotes
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.
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Mark Twain Quotes
Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.
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William James Quotes
I would never use a long word where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who 'ligate' arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes Quotes
At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer.
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Marshall Lumsden Quotes
Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.
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Thomas Earnest Hulme Quotes
Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
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Aldous Huxley Quotes
Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery.
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Mark Amidon Quotes
He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
Be not the slave of Words.
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Thomas Carlyle Quotes
Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
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Samuel Butler Quotes
One man's frankness is another man's vulgarity.
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Kevin Smith Quotes
Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities.
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Alfred North Whitehead Quotes
I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically.
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George W. Bush Quotes