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"Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words."
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"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."
"These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages."
"Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies."
"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."
"Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling."
Explore more quotes by Alexis de Tocqueville
"The passion for war is so intense that there is no undertaking so mad, or so injurious to the welfare of the State, that a man does not consider himself honored in defending it, at the risk of his life."
"The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other."
"Durability is one of the chief elements of strength. Nothing is either loved or feared but that which is likely to endure."
"Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners."
"The whole life of an American is passed like a game of chance, a revolutionary crisis, or a battle."
"Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
"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."
"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it."
"An American cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation. He speaks to you as if he was addressing a meeting; and if he should chance to become warm in the discussion, he will say "Gentlemen" to the person with whom he is conversing."
"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America."
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