Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 61.
“This is just one example of the trimming of the self that — along with the language itself, where verbs and nouns changed places as freely as one dare to have them do so — bred in us such an overpowering sense of ambivalence that in ten years we ended up with a willpower in no way superior to a seaweed’s.”
Source: Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986), p. 14
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Joseph Brodsky 17
Russian and American poet and Nobel Prize for Literature la… 1940–1996Related quotes

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities. Sing the battle hymns and we will take them up where you left off. Not one, not ten, not ten thousand, not a million, not ten millions, not a hundred millions but a billion, two billions of us all — the people of the world. We will have the slogans and we will have the hymns and we will have the guns and we will use them and we will live. Make no mistake of it, we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquillity, in security, in decency, in peace. You plan the wars, you masters of men — plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.
“Nouns and verbs carry writing.”
Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 2, Ceremonies of Innocence, p. 58

“You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.”

As quoted in Facets of Liberty: A Libertarian Primer, L.K. Samuels, editor, Freeland Press and Rampart Institute, Santa Ana: CA, Chap. 5, p. 70

“I believe in love the verb, not the noun.”
Source: He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

Speech to the Bar Association of Boston, in Speeches (1913), p. 85.
1910s
Whorf (1937) "Grammer categories" in: Language, (1945) Vol 21. p. 1-11.