Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.
- Aldous Huxley
Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks
- Alfred North Whitehead
For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.
- Ambrose Bierce
Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
- Andrea Dworkin
Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
- Angela Carter
Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.
- Anna Jameson
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
- Antonin Artaud
No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
- Aubrey Beardsley
I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.
- Belva Plain
The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearne, but it is still nonsense.
- Benjamin Franklin
Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.
- Benjamin Lee Whorf
Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have a different effect.
- Blaise Pascal
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphines
- Carl Sagan
All language reflects the prejudices of the society in which it evolved.
- Casey Miller
Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed.
- Casey Miller
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
- Charlemagne
When a language creates - as it does - a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.
- Christopher Ricks
Language helps form the limits of our reality.
- Dale Spender
How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?
- E m Forster
Don Chaucer. well of English undefyled On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.
- Edmund Spenser
Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.
- Elizabeth Bowen
Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.
- Elizabeth Bowen
The language of truth is simple.
- Euripides
If language had been the creation not of poetry but of logic, we should only have one.
- Friedrich Hebbel
A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
- Gaston Bachelard
We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
- H R Halderman
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
- Heinrich Heine
If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of humn thought.
- Helen Keller
The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
- Henri Delacroix
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
- Henry Brooks Adams
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
- Hermann Weyl
We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
- Iris Murdoch
Morals and manners will rise or decline with our attention to grammar.
- Jason Chamberlain
To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German.
- Jason Chamberlain
Grammar, which knows how to lord it over kings, and with high hands makes them obey its laws.
- Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
A laudation in Greek is of marvellous efficacy on the title-page of a book.
- Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
- John French
And don't confound the language of the nation With long-tailed words in osity and ation.
- John Hookham Frere
The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.
- John Ruskin
Syllables govern the world.
- John Selden
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
- Joseph Conrad
Like a diaphanous nightgown language both hides and reveals
- Karen Elizabeth Gordon
I have been a believer in the magic of language since at a very early age I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out
- Katherine Dunn
For I am a bear of very little brain and long words bother me.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
- Marcellinus Ammianus
Language. I loved it. And for a long time I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.
- Maya Angelou
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
- Noam Chomsky
Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.
- Penelope Lively
I can remember the lush spring excitement of language in childhood. Sitting in church, rolling it around my mouth like marbles--tabernacle and pharisee and parable, tresspass and Babylon and covenant.
- Penelope Lively
The most precious things in speech are pauses.
- Ralph Richardson
Language is the roadmap of a culture. It tells you where its people came from and where they are going.
- Rita Mae Brown
Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
- Rita Mae Brown
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
- Robert Benchley
The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
- Robert Burchfield
Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I am the King of Rome, and above grammar.
- Sigismund
Language is memory and metaphor.
- Storm Jameson
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
- Toni Morrison
Language is wine upon the lips.
- Virginia Woolf
Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
- Walt Whitman
