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The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
-Marcellinus Ammianus
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I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.
-Sir Edward Appleton
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All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
-Antonin Artaud
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A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
-Gaston Bachelard
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Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
-J. G. Ballard
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Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
-Roland Barthes
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All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.
-Roland Barthes
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If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable. Unless, of course, one wishes to locate that origin in the unconscious and spiritual domain of subjectivity and postulate the existence of an unconscious and spiritual language as well as an unconscious and spiritual being separate from the actual and present being. Here the conflation between subjectivity and language is perfect; a conflation that appears to confirm the history of language, subjectivity and knowledge. If this were the case the expression
http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb04-2/bartoloni04.html
-Paolo Bartoloni
The Paradox of Translation via Benjamin and Agamben
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If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
-Jean Baudrillard
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Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
-Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories, ch. 3 (1987, trans. 1990)
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No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
-Aubrey Beardsley
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One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
-John Berger
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Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
-Louise Bogan
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Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
-Rita Mae Brown
Starting From Scratch (1988)
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The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
-Robert Burchfield
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The English language is being augmented every year by about 400 new words. We cannot cope. We are drowning in the plethora. It
-Anthony Burgess
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The downtrodden, who are the great creators of slang.
-Anthony Burgess
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
-Italo Calvino
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There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
-Elias Canetti
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By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.
-Miguel de Cervantes
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It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
-Raymond Chandler
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I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be pass? before it gets into print.
-Raymond Chandler
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To have another language is to possess a second soul.
-Charlemagne
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I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.
-Charles V
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If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.
-Prince Of Wales Charles
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Books about Language
