Quotes about language

"The language of truth is simple."

Euripides on language
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"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 on language   

"The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense."

Franklin, Benjamin on language
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"Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place."

French, John on language   

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on 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 on language   

"It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs."

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

Heidegger, Martin on language   

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

Heine, Heinrich on language   

"The eyes have one language everywhere."

Herbert, George on language   

"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 on language   

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

Hoban, Russell on language   

"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 on language   

"Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden."

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on language   

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell on language
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"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 on language   

"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 on language   

"Language is the pedigree of nations."

Johnson on language   

"Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee."

Johnson, Ben on language   

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"Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas."

Johnson, Samuel on language   

"I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations."

Johnson, Samuel on language   

"Language is the dress of thought."

Johnson, Samuel on language
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"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 on language   

"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 on language   

"Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden."

Kraus, Karl on language
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"Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing."

Levi-Strauss, Claude on language   

"Language is the inventory of human experience."

Lockhart, L. W. on language   

"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 on language   

"No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead."

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth on language   

"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. on language   

"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 on language   

"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 on language   

"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 on language   

"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 on language   

"Poetry is all nouns and verbs."

Moore, Marianne on language   

"Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast."

Muller, Max on language   

"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 on language   

"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 on language
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"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 on language
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"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 squirting out ink."

Orwell, George on language