Language Quotes
-
We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
-
Donald Trump came along and spoke in a language that speaks directly to a portion of the Republican base with what they want to hear. I don`t think that he actually has a very significant ideology.
Ben Domenech
-
Mathematics is the language in which the gods talk to people.
Plato
-
Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like 'knight.'
Joshua Foer
-
If during their education our youths become alienated from their language, history, ancestors, culture and civilization, it means there is a very serious educational problem there.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
-
What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.
Etgar Keret
-
The things I see now on TV and in movies are so outlandish. Kids doing rude things with pies! And the language that they use! It's being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. I can't watch it. It turns me off.
Sid Caesar
-
No doubt you are as alarmed as I by the tragic decline in America's language skills. If 10 people read the following sentence: Two tanker trucks has just overturned in Alaska, spilling a totel of 10,000 gallons of beer onto a highway. two would find an error in subject-verb agreement, two would find an error in spelling, and six would find a sponge and drive north.
Mike Nichols
-
I can’t translate myself into language any more.
Alice Notley
-
Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.
John Lukacs
-
Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
Virginia Woolf
-
Language is a social art.
Willard Van Orman Quine
-
I feel that as the world becomes more and more multicultural, it's a good tool to be able to speak another language.
Sarah Shahi
-
I want to tell A Story, Every Story, everything all at once, not anything in particular that might be said through the words I know, and I try to roll all sounds into one, to accumulate more and more syllables, as if they might make a Möbius strip of language in which everything, everything is contained. There is a hidden rule even in this game, though - that the sounds have to resemble real syllables, that they can't disintegrate into brute noise, for then I wouldn't be talking at all. I want articulation - but articulation that says the whole world at once.
Eva Hoffman
-
The reformers' preferred metaphor is "leveling the playing field." They should listen to the logic of their language: fields are leveled by bulldozers.
George Will
-
Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.
David Gelernter
-
Jokes spread around the world and embed themselves in our shared culture; the most resonant of them get lodged in the language in the same way as cliches or old wives' tales do.
Jimmy Carr
-
I will not allow my daughters to learn foreign languages because one tongue is sufficient for a woman.
John Milton
