Motivational Quotes

Language

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

- Jordan, June

Best Quotes about Language

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

William Shakespeare

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

Einstein, Albert

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

Trench, Richard Chevenix

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

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 common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Cooper, James F.

10.

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

Rita Mae Brown

11.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

Beardsley, Aubrey

12.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

13.

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

14.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

15.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost --that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization --is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Hugo, Victor

16.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

17.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

18.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

19.

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

Abraham Lincoln

20.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

21.

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

22.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Saussure, Ferdinand De

23.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

24.

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.

25.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland --and no other.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

27.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Heidegger, Martin

28.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

29.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

30.

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

31.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

33.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Canetti, Elias

35.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

36.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

37.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

38.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

39.

We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Abigail Adams

40.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

41.

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

42.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

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

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.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

Artaud, Antonin

46.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

47.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

48.

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

Burchfield, Robert

49.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

50.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry