Language Quotes

Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.

Unknown

Do Not Disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maids.

Tim Bedore

Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.

Eugene Debs

Experience becomes possible because of language.

Noam Chomsky, Ruth Anshen, Biography of an Idea (Mt. Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell Limited, 1986), pg. 196

We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language.... We have affection We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness is about as close to a common goal of nature as I can guess at. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.

Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand.

Lewis Thomas

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly... I think - - Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it.

Henry David Thoreau

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

George Bernard Shaw

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Forbes Book of Business Quotations

Language is the dress of thought.

Samuel Johnson

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

James Grover Thurbe

The purpose of most computer languages is to lengthen your resume by a word and a comma.

Larry Wall

Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.

Field Marshall John French

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

Black Hawk

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion (1916) preface

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

Mark Twain

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg, New York Times Feb. 13, 1959