Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.
Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada
Statement to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, as quoted in Problems of Journalism (1966) by the American Society of Newspaper Editors
Unsourced variant : "Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens — it is an imposition on the state."
Variant: Bilingualism is an imposition on the state and not the citizens.
“A distinguished diplomat could hold his tongue in ten languages. ”
Henry Wotton (1568–1639) English ambassador
Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman
"What is War?" (1924)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)
1950s, Atoms for Peace (1953)
Context: I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new--one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare. The atomic age has moved forward at such a pace that every citizen of the world should have some comprehension, at least in comparative terms, of the extent of this development of the utmost significance to every one of us. Clearly, if the people of the world are to conduct an intelligent search for peace, they must be armed with the significant facts of today's existence.
“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”
Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author
Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++
The Problem with Programming (Interview with Bjarne Stroustrup), MIT Technology Review, November 28, 2006, Jason Pontin, 2007-11-15 http://technologyreview.com/Infotech/17831/page3/,
“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) French writer and philosopher
A Retrospective Glance at the Lifework of a Master of Books
Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)
“Good writers are those who keep the language efficient.”
Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading
Source: ABC of Reading (1934), Chapter 3
Context: Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
