S. I. Hayakawa Quotes
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Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries.
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The great thing about the United States is our ability to absorb foreign people and make them a part of us.
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Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.
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Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing.
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The last thing a scientist would do is cling to a map because he inherited it from his grandfather, or because it was used by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
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The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.
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I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.
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The English Language Amendment says above all, 'Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English. Let us not deny them the opportunity to participate in American life, so that they can go as far as their dreams and talents can take them.
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You just don't know anything unless you can write it. Sure you can argue things out in your own head and bring them out at parties, but in order to argue anything thoroughly, you must be able to put it down on paper.
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Patriotic societies seem to think that the way to educate school children in a democracy is to stage bigger and better flag-saluting.
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Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.
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How anybody dresses is indicative of his self-concept. If students are dirty and ragged, it indicates they are not interested in tidying up their intellects either.
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Ever since man began to till the soil and learned not to eat the seed grain but to plant it and wait for harvest, the postponement of gratification has been the basis of a higher standard of living and of civilization.