Grammar Quotes
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Grammar is the mistress of words, the embellisher of the human race; through the practice of the noble reading of ancient authors, she helps us, we know, by her counsels. The barbarian kings do not use her; as is well known, she remains unique to lawful rulers. For the tribes possess arms and the rest; rhetoric is found in sole obedience to the lords of the Romans.
Cassiodorus
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What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
George Eliot
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The rules of English grammar are largely an artificial construct with little or no bearing on the language as it is spoke.
Ben Aaronovitch
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Grammar is the analysis of language.
Edgar Allan Poe
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“If plain run is good enough for I, you, we, they, why isn't it good enough for he, she, it? Because we have no choice in the matter. The decision was made by those who fixed our grammar at a certain stage of its evolution, and their decision will probably stand forever.”
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
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The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is fraught with grave possibilities of misunderstanding.
Benjamin Lee Whorf
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A pronoun, too, will aptly reflect the number of its antecedent: "they" does not refer to one person, no matter how many personalities she or he has, or how eager you are to skirt the gender frays.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon
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Mr Robert Montgomery's genius is far too free and aspiring to be shackled by the rules of syntax? His readers must take such grammar as they can get and be thankful.
Nathan Rothschild, 1st Baron Rothschild
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I shall here present the view that numbers, even whole numbers, are words, parts of speech, and that mathematics is their grammar. Numbers were therefore invented by people in the same sense that language, both written and spoken, was invented. Grammar is also an invention. Words and numbers have no existence separate from the people who use them. Knowledge of mathematics is transmitted from one generation to another, and it changes in the same slow way that language changes. Continuity is provided by the process of oral or written transmission.
Carl Eckart
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People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.
Delphine de Vigan
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Ugliness supersedes all rules of grammar.
Arthur Mattuck
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Time in China has no immediacy as in America. Here I find the swift passage of our few earthly years accepted as naturally as the fall of flower and leaf. ... I hear and speak a language in which grammar has no tense. Both scholars and illiterates, in ordinary daily speech, tell an event of centuries ago as casually as an incident of the hour. Only as my knowledge has accumulated have I been able to know whether something related happened just then or in some past dynasty.
Nora Waln
