Language Quotes

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Go learn the language. Go take some acting lessons. Start from zero like everybody else.

For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.

Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

The spoken form is in fact a very restrained representation of what is possible in the musical language.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Faith is more basic than language or theology.

When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.

The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.

War is what happens when language fails.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language.

No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

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.

People who do not speak our language very well do complain of feeling rebuffed by French people, who can sometimes be impatient, or even intolerant.

No one's going to be able to operate without a grounding in the basic sciences. Language would be helpful, although English is becoming increasingly international. And travel. You have to have a global attitude.

In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.

If the president is going to use so much language of theology and the Bible, then let's use that language for a serious discussion about the war in Iraq. And that was never done.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.

My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.