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

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

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

Lewis Thomas

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

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

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

Bachelard, Gaston

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

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

Dworkin, Andrea

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Montessori, Maria

10.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Lockhart, L. W.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Benchley, Robert

15.

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

16.

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

17.

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

Cioran, E. M.

18.

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

Sir Winston Churchill

19.

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

William Butler Yeats

20.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee

21.

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

22.

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

23.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Weil, Simone

24.

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

Orwell, George

25.

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

Charles V

26.

Jordan, June

27.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

28.

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

29.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

30.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

West, Nathanael

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.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

Herbert, George

33.

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

Burchfield, Robert

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

36.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Artaud, Antonin

38.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

Johnson

39.

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

Ingrid Bengis

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Herman Melville

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

47.

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

48.

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

Hoban, Russell

49.

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

Heidegger, Martin

50.

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