
Source: 7 March 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 107
Source: 7 March 1942, quoted in Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 55
Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 112
Context: The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.
George Boole, quoted in Kenneth E. Iverson's 1979 Turing Award Lecture
Attributed from posthumous publications
Source: Brain Wave Vibration: Getting Back Into the Rhythm of a Happy, Healthy Life
“Language is the dress of thought.”
The Life of Cowley
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)