Language Quotes
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Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.
Willard Van Orman Quine
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But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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The common fluency of speech in many men, and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter and a scarcity of words; for whosoever is a master of language, and hath a mind full of ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon the choice of both.
Jonathan Swift
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I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.
Sebastian Arcelus
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Many of us have to spell words such as "out," "cookie," and "bath" when conversing with other people, lest we unnecessarily excite our pets. And even then they often understand. I've actually had clients who resorted to using a second language around their dogs, but after a while their perceptive pooches caught on. Who says dogs don't understand us?
Warren Eckstein
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Kitty Kelley's method, already perfected in her unauthorised and unflattering biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan, is to write bestsellers that take what she describes as an 'unblinking look' at their subjects - which might, of course, mean that her eyes are permanently open or permanently closed... the result is a work so bad that Britons cannot realise how fortunate they are in being unable to buy it. The great mistake with this book is not that it has been published in Britain, but that it has actually been published anywhere else.
David Cannadine
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Yiddish is a wonderfully rich, descriptive, onomatopoeic language full of colorful words and expressions. But Yiddish is more than just language. It’s a window into the Jewish mind-set. It’s a way of thinking, of seeing and categorizing the world. Yiddish knocks the high and mighty off their pedestals. It questions authority. It argues. It keenly observes the subtle nuances of human behavior. It’s philosophical about life. And, of course, it’s sarcastic as hell.
Adrienne Gusoff
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Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.
Anthony Robbins
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Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.
Erica Jong
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Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we're married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share.... It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.
Rowan Williams
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Spite is a little word, but it represents as strange a jumble of feelings and compound of discords, as any polysyllable in the language.
Charles Dickens
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How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.
Black Hawk
