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Language Quotes
"I'd forgotten I'd done the anime called Spirited Away, the English version of a Japanese film."
28
"I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic."
27
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
27
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
26
"A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable."
26
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
26
"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."
26
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
25
"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."
25
"So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure."
25
"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."
25
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
25
"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."
25
"You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language."
25
"Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, non-committal language."
24
"Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us."
24
"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
24
"English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite."
24
"The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language."
23
"I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried."
23
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
23
"Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages."
23
"Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt."
23
"Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language."
22
"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem."
22
"In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language."
22
"When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it."
22
"Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in its application once the language is taught. But this raises a curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence."
22
"Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
22
"How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem."
22
"It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent."
22
"I think maybe the English don't want to try something and look stupid, because they are a bit reserved."
21
"The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language."
21
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