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Language Quotes
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
16
"English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite."
16
"The alphabet is where all our secrets begin."
16
"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs."
16
"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."
16
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
15
"The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language."
15
"Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that."
15
"Like, What is the least often heard sentence in the English language? That would be: Say, isn't that the banjo player's Porsche parked outside?"
15
"When I was quite young, she was working in a hardware store, so I grew up knowing about hardware."
15
"Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past."
15
"I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life."
15
"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
15
"The words which we use in our everyday speech are nothing other than watered-down magic."
15
"But I am a storyteller, and that involves language, for me the English language, that wonderfully rich, complex, and ofttimes confusing tongue. When language is limited, I am thereby diminished, too."
15
"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it."
15
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
15
"Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it."
14
"For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation."
14
"I had one companion. He was a teacher from the Ukraine who spoke English so we could communicate a bit. I learnt a few Russian words, but it was hard to concentrate."
14
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
14
"Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds."
14
"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."
14
"Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
14
"Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek."
13
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."
13
"A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him, what then? Why sir they'll swap that twin dog around thro' the four cases till he'll think he's an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that. I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way."
13
"Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us."
13
"The form language used by the ancient Egyptians in their structures is minimal."
13
"I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre."
13
"A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable."
13
"Now multitudes of root words are identical in the American languages over vast areas some of them with precisely the same senses, and others with various shades of analogical meaning."
13
"The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody."
13
"That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way."
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