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

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Lodge, David

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

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

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

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

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Levi-Strauss, Claude

13.

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

14.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

Orwell, George

15.

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.

Ingrid Bengis

16.

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

Dworkin, Andrea

17.

After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?

Hoban, Russell

18.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Mann, Thomas

19.

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

William Shakespeare

20.

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay

White, Elwyn Brooks

21.

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

Will, George F.

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.

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

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.

Muller, Max

26.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

27.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

28.

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

Heine, Heinrich

29.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

30.

The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.

Burgess, Anthony

31.

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

32.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

33.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

Moore, Marianne

34.

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

Cioran, E. M.

35.

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

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

36.

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

Orwell, George

37.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

38.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

Man, Paul De

39.

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

40.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

41.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Charles V

42.

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

43.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

Berger, John

44.

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

45.

Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Hoban, Russell

46.

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

Wilde, Oscar

47.

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

48.

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

Pancoast, Mal

49.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

50.

Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.

Paz, Octavio