Language Quotes
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I may fight the British ruler, but I do not hate the English or their language. In fact, I appreciate their literary treasures.
Mahatma Gandhi
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Language, if it throws a veil over our ideas, adds a softness and refinement to them, like that which the atmosphere gives to naked objects.
William Hazlitt
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If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.
M. Scott Peck
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I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language... Apache.
Steve Martin
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She stood before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest, and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors, belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
Hermann Hesse
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I distrust pious phrases, especially when they issue from my mouth. I try militantly never to be affected by the pious language of the faithful but it is always coming out when you least expect it. In contrast to the pious language of the faithful, the liturgy is beautifully flat.
Flannery O'Connor
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A group of psychologists say they have discovered twenty-three different body language indicators that show whether or not a person is lying. If you would like to see all twenty-three at the same time, they recommend taking a guided tour of the White House.
Conan O'Brien
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... one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross over-simplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement.
Geoffrey Hill
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Geometry in every proposition speaks a language which experience never dares to utter; and indeed of which she but halfway comprehends the meaning.
William Whewell
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Many people with different backgrounds, cultures, languages, and creeds combine to make a nation. But that nation is greater than the sum total of the individual skills and talents of its people. Something more grows out of their unity than can be calculated by adding the assets of individual contributions. That intangible additional quantity is often due to the differences which make the texture of the nation rich. Therefore, we must never wipe out or deride the differences amongst us-for where there is no difference, there is only indifference.
Louis Nizer
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Learning astrology is like learning any foreign language. You already have the ideas, concepts, and experiences of your life within you; you are just learning a new language for what you are already experiencing.
Barbara Goldsmith
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The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
D. H. Lawrence
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Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.
C.D. Wright
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The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.
Russell Baker
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I am of the international upper class, the Swedish petit bourgeoisie of Jewish extraction with poor language skills, a conveyor of a few expressions and faces, with some intonation that combines ancient human experience with timely coquetry.
Erland Josephson
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For a general semanticist, communication is not merely words in proper order properly inflected (as for the grammarian) or assertions in proper relation to each other (as for the logician) or assertions in proper relation to referents (as for the semanticist), but all these together, with the chain of 'fact to nervous system to language to nervous system to action.
Anatol Rapoport
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Instrumental music can spread the international language.
Herb Alpert
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There is a loving way with words and an unloving way. And it is only with the loving way that the simplicity of language becomes beautiful.
Margaret Wise Brown
