 
|
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
-Samuel Johnson
|
|
|
|
Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things they denote.
-Samuel Johnson
|
|
|
|
It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
-Franklin P. Jones
|
|
|
|
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic/ape/suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.
-June Jordan
|
|
|
|
Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
-Ursula K. LeGuin
|
|
|
|
Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.
-David Lehman
|
|
|
|
Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
-Claude Levi-Strauss
|
|
|
|
Language is the inventory of human experience.
-L. W. Lockhart
|
|
|
|
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are prefabricated in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
-David Lodge
The State of the Language, Where It's At, 1980. Defending Californian slang, or psychobabble
|
|
|
|
No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
|
|
|
|
Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
-Thomas Babington Macaulay
|
|
|
|
Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.
-Paul De Man
|
|
|
|
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.
-Thomas Mann
|
|
|
|
Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.
-Harry Mathews
|
|
|
|
Just as in habiliments it is a sign of weakness to wish to make oneself noticeable by some peculiar and unaccustomed fashion, so, in language, the quest for new-fangled phrases and little-known words comes from a puerile and pedantic ambition.
-Michel de Montaigne, 1580
|
|
|
|
There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!
-Maria Montessori
|
|
|
|
Poetry is all nouns and verbs.
-Marianne Moore
|
|
|
|
Language is a field of battle, the media is the artillery, and vocabulary is the ammunition. The NWO has taken the field by storm, and is proceeding with coordinated attacks on several fronts, using all the latest high-tech vocabulary ammunition. They've laid a bed of land mines that cripple us when we try to stand on them: 'liberalism', conservatism', prosperity', 'democracy'.
-Richard Moore
Doublespeak
|
|
|
|
Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast.
-Max Muller
|
|
|
|
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 Ndebele
|
|
|
|
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
-George Orwell
|
|
|
|
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
-George Orwell
|
|
|
|
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
-George Orwell
Politics and the English Language, 1946
|
|
|
|
We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.
-Mal Pancoast
|
|
|
|
Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudosocialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past.
-Octavio Paz
|
|
Books about Language
