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Language Quotes
"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language."
10
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
10
"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
10
"I want do a Mandarin language movie. It'll probably be the next movie I do after the one I do next."
10
"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."
10
"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."
10
"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
10
"All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain."
10
"I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish."
10
"More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor."
10
"We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them."
10
"BELLADONNA, n. In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
10
"Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?"
10
"Its language is as bare as a monk's cell, and as uninviting."
9
"I think I make better use of language and imagery than when I started out."
9
"The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles."
9
"Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus."
9
"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
9
"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."
9
"When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language."
9
"Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague."
9
"A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it."
9
"The English had hit upon a splendid joke. They intended to catch me or to bring me down."
9
"It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water."
9
"If you can not master your language you must be it's slave."
9
"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."
9
"I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language."
9
"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."
9
"Though language forms the preacher, 'Tis good works make the man."
9
"The winged word. The mercurial word. The word that is both moth and lamp. The word that is itself and more. the associative word light with meanings. The word not netted by meaning. The exact word wide. The word not whore nor cenobite. The word unlied."
9
"My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything."
8
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