Language Quotes
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The adjective is the enemy of the noun and the adverb the enemy of damn near everything else. Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language.
Alfred Bertram Guthrie
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No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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I couldn't know about my culture, my history, without learning the language, so I started learning Arabic - reading, writing. I used to speak Arabic before that, but Tunisian Arabic dialect. Step by step, I discovered calligraphy. I painted before and I just brought the calligraphy into my artwork. That's how everything started. The funny thing is the fact that going back to my roots made me feel French.
eL Seed
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Apparently Arnold was inspired by President Bush, who proved you can be a successful politician in this country even if English is your second language.
Conan O'Brien
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To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.
Sandra Cisneros
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We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.
Terence McKenna
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As actors, we were fighting that tooth and nail because of fear, because language is a crutch and dialogue is a crutch, and it's so easy to just have a great writer write you a line.
Charlize Theron
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Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
Paul de Man
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In a language known to us, we have substituted the opacity of the sounds with the transparence of the ideas. But a language we donot know is a closed place in which the one we love can deceive us, making us, locked outside and convulsed in our impotence, incapable of seeing or preventing anything.
Marcel Proust
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The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.
Conan O'Brien
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The Kurds know that they won't achieve their own state by force of arms but through international recognition. And they have certainly heard what the German foreign minister said in connection with the arms deliveries: There is no Kurdish state. But that shouldn't prevent the Kurds from continuing to develop their own institutions. Still, the best thing for them would be to remain a part of Iraq, but in return we must treat them with respect - their nationality, their language and their culture.
Ahmed Chalabi
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Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
Raymond Williams
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Every language has its own music.
Sid Caesar
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All of the 29 Marines that I went in [with], we got together and made a code in our own language. There were over 400 or 500 words that we made up at that time. We memorized them and everything was up here.
Chester Nez
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If you listen to a language for 15 minutes, you know the rhythm and song.
Sid Caesar
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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
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Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
Galileo Galilei
