Motivational Quotes

Language

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

- Guin, Ursula K. Le

Best Quotes about Language

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Orwell, George

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

George Orwell

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing.

Benchley, Robert

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

Porter, Katherine Anne

The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

10.

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.

Robert Benchley

11.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

12.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

Daumal, Rene

13.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

Dworkin, Andrea

14.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

15.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

Vidal, Gore

16.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

17.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

19.

Guin, Ursula K. Le

20.

High thoughts must have high language.

Aristophanes

21.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

22.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

Baudrillard, Jean

23.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

Vico, Giambattista

24.

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

Pancoast, Mal

25.

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

26.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Fanon, Frantz

27.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

28.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

29.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

30.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

31.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

32.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

Heine, Heinrich

33.

Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.

William Penn

34.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

35.

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

36.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Burchfield, Robert

37.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

38.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

39.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

40.

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

Charles, Prince Of Wales

41.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.

Rich, Adrienne

42.

Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.

Steiner, George

43.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

44.

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

45.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

46.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Levi-Strauss, Claude

47.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.