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I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?
-Sydney Pfizer
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You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.
-Katherine Anne Porter
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Every man is a part of each and our senses are attached to both. So when a man speaks of himself as a man, he is in matter; but when he speaks a scientific truth, he is out of matter and so far equal to god. So man's investigations are but an imitation of wisdom's experiments for his own happiness. And man not wanting to be outdone by his father tries to imitate what he sees and hears; this makes man a kind of progressive being. Man invents language from the fact that he cannot be satisfied to let God or wisdom dictate his acts, so he invents language to explain his wisdom. It has been said that language was invented to deceive others. In some cases I have no doubt but the world thinks it does but wisdom gives it another direction; or language acts to undeceive and it often exposes our ignorance.
-Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, August 16, 1861
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The omission of an expected conjunction is called an asyndeton. Caesar is supposed to have said about Gaul: I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln concluded the Gettysburg Address, That government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Caesar seems to have omitted his conjunction to speed things up; he is emphasizing how quickly the conquest of a place follows from its being sighted by a great and ambitious general. Lincoln's omission is more subtle
-Arthur Quinn
Figures of Speech, 1982
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Style, is like a frog: you can dissect the thing, but it somehow dies in the process.
-Arthur Quinn
Figures of Speech, 1982
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Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.
-Arthur Quinn
Figures of Speech, 1982
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We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative.
-Adrienne Rich
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When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
-Christopher Ricks
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Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.
-Richard D. Rosen
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If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
-Salman Rushdie
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The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
-John Ruskin
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Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
-Carl Sandburg
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According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.
-Barry Sanders
A is for Ox, 1994
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Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
-Ferdinand De Saussure
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A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
-Ferdinand De Saussure
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The word of man is the most durable of all material.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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It was Greek to me.
-William Shakespeare
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
-George Steiner
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We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.
-Henry David Thoreau
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Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
-Paul Tillich
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The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.
-Alexis de Tocqueville
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I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
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Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
-Lily Tomlin
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Books about Language
