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Language Quotes
"Bunny boiler is now part of our language, and I'm proud of that."
53
"Language cannot describe the scene that followed; the shouts, oaths, frantic gestures, taunts, replies, and little fights; and therefore I shall not attempt it."
52
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
51
"Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language."
49
"We may come to Jesus and ask Him; He will know all about it; if He comes to a little child, he will adapt himself to the language and capacity of a little child."
49
"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."
48
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
48
"A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs."
47
"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."
47
"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."
46
"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
45
"In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages."
45
"A young man who is here speaks the Panis language, and in many other respects, is preferable."
45
"Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us."
44
"It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
44
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
44
"Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence-'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs."
44
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
44
"Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."
44
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
44
"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."
43
"Those were the days, you know. It's an English thing; as soon as it's gets to 6 pm, you have to go and have a drink. We used to stick to that religiously."
43
"The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language."
42
"One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'"
42
"I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried."
42
"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."
42
"In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary."
42
"The English had hit upon a splendid joke. They intended to catch me or to bring me down."
42
"Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple."
42
"Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them."
42
"When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it."
42
"There is nothing in philosophy which could not be said in everyday language."
42
"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."
41
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