Language Quotes
The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.
Njabulo S Ndebele
I have issued the command, and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death's-head formation in readiness, for the present only in the East, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
Adolf Hitler
Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.
David Bezmozgis
The benefits of science are not only material ones. The truths that science teaches are of common interest the world over. The language of science is universal, and is a powerful force in bringing the peoples of the world closer together.
Arthur Holly Compton
Because we rejected a certain kind of critical language people just assumed that we were dumb.
Alice Notley
If I as a geologist were called upon to explain briefly our modern ideas of the origin of the earth and the development of life on it to a simple, pas- toral people, such as the tribes to whom the Book of Genesis was addressed, I could hardly do better than follow rather closely much of the language of the first chapter of Genesis.
Wallace Pratt
What we're trying to do as writers is rescue, preserve this space of thoughtfulness of language, of a deeper and more honest appreciation of our reality. And, so, we have to work even harder as writers against this tide of silliness, against this tide of superficiality, against this horrible Greek chorus on Twitter where everyone is insulting each other and now we have an insulter-in-chief, who's risen to the presidency by insulting people.
Hector Tobar
Concerned to reconstruct past ideas, historians must approach the generation that held them as the anthropologist approaches an alien culture. They must, that is, be prepared at the start to find that natives speak a different language and map experience into different categories from those they themselves bring from home. And they must take as their object the discovery of those categories and the assimilation of the corresponding language.
Thomas Kuhn
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and were we have to surrender precision for flexibility.
Northrop Frye
I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.
Joshua Foer
Ay, is it not a language I speak?
William Shakespeare
To me the drawn language is a very revealing language: one can see in a few lines whether a man is really an architect.
Eero Saarinen
No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother's love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over wastes of worldly fortunes sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
Good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language.
Betty Boothroyd
for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge
Virginia Woolf
Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.
Elias Lyman Magoon
