Language Quotes
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Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.
Leon Trotsky
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I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.
Virgil Thomson
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Only a handful of Germans in the Reich had the slightest conception of the eternal and merciless struggle for the German language, German schools, and a German way of life. Only today, when the same deplorable misery is forced on many millions of Germans from the Reich, who under foreign rule dream of their common fatherland and strive, amid their longing, at least to preserve their holy right to their mother tongue, do wider circles understand what it means to be forced to fight for one's nationality.
Adolf Hitler
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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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I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.
Virginia Woolf
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Language builds on our cognitive capacities to reason about the goals and intentions of other people, on our desire to imitate, our desire to communicate, and our twin capacities for using convention to name things and sequence to indicate differences between differing possibilities.
Gary Marcus
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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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Our language for describing emotions is very crude... that's what music is for, I guess.
Ben Goertzel
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All this fighting stems from the illusion that people choose to learn a language for rational reasons, that they are looking for the language that has the most useful features, the best agenda. But no one is out there comparison shopping for an artificial language. They find what they like, and there's no accounting for taste.
Arika Okrent
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One barrier... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.
David Perkins
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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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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
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Language should fulfill your individual existence as a wholesome human being... Language should be more than just getting by.
Chogyam Trungpa
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Pantaenus was one of these and is said to have gone to India. It is reported that among persons there who knew of Christ, he found the Gospel according to Matthew, which had anticipated his own arrival. For Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left with them the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language, which they had preserved till that time. After many good deeds, Pantaenus finally became the head of the school at Alexandria, and expounded the treasures of divine doctrine both orally and in writing.
Elton Welsby
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Love is the language all animals understand.
Anthony Douglas Williams
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Color and bite permeate a language designed to rally many men, to destroy some, and to change the minds of others.
William Lewis Safir
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I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.
Kathleen Raine
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The Greek language seems different than other languages. I'm not the only person to think this. Usually, I come up with some kind of dopey metaphor for why it's different. But it seems, somehow, more original, more like being in the morning of language.
Anne Carson
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Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Seemingly innocuous language like 'Oh, I'm flexible' or 'What do you want to do tonight?' has a dark computational underbelly that should make you think twice. It has the veneer of kindness about it, but it does two deeply alarming things. First, it passes the cognitive buck: 'Here's a problem, you handle it.' Second, by not stating your preferences, it invites the others to simulate or imagine them. And as we have seen, the simulation of the minds of others is one of the biggest computational challenges a mind or machine can ever face.
Brian Christian
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Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike.
Willard Van Orman Quine
