Language Quotes
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It's difficult to find a house with no map at 3 o'clock in the morning in a foreign country and where you don't speak the language.
Ben Nicholson
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Political correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent this idea of people who are politically correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That's all part of being a decent human being.
Clare Short
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Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.
Francine Prose
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If you really want people to pay attention to how you feel, you need to express your feelings in language that's worth reading.
David Starkey
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As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.
Antoine Lavoisier
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We're very concerned with language and how language works. We're trying to engage people rather than dictate how they should be thinking.
Neville Brody
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It will be my birthday on Tuesday. Last year, I reached the painful conclusion that there wasn't enough time left to read every book ever written. This year, my gloomy realisation is even more painful - I will not be able to correct everyone's mistakes before I depart.
Daniel Finkelstein
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There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
William Osler
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Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
Vincent Van Gogh
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We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
Will Self
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Nature has a language of its own, or maybe those who have lived long in solitude read in it their own unconscious inner feelings and mysterious foreknowledge.
Alexandra David-Neel
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Vague and mysterious forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge.
John Locke
Nazareth
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Dig -- the mostly uncouth -- language of grace.
Geoffrey Hill
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Words have no language which can utter the secrets of love; and beyond the limits of expression is the expounding of desire.
Hafez
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By bridging the literacy barrier through the use of 3D interactive models we overcome the inherent limitations of text. At the same time, language differences become much less important as text is replaced by interactive, 3D images.
Fay Chung
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Hip hop is at its essence a folk music, because it speaks the language that people are still speaking at ground zero, it speaks the language that people speak on the streets.
Talib Kweli
Black Star
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A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
Paul Graham
