“Of all the media of expression employed by man (and let us never forget that they are many) none are so unstable, none so quick to change their meaning, as words.”

Source: The Squatter and the Don

Testimony in The Public Television Act of 1967 : Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Communications, by the United States Congress, p. 167
Context: Our society is changing so rapidly that none of us can know what it is or where it is going. All of us who are mature feel that there are historic principles of behavior and morality, of things that we all believe in that are being lost, not because young people couldn't believe in them, but because there is no language for translating them into contemporary terms.
The search for that language, the search for the ways to tell young people what we know as we grow older — the permanent and wonderful things about life — will be one of the great functions of this system. We are losing this generation. We all know that. We need a way to get them back.

Source: Empire novels (1950–1952), Pebble in the Sky (1950), Chapter 5 "The Involuntary Volunteer" (p. 57)

Source: The Marvelous Land of Oz

Source: Pebble in the Sky

Sí che vegga il mondo, quando la fortuna vuol torre a 'ssassinare uno uomo, quante diverse vie la piglia.
Autobiography, vol. 1, ch. 113; translation from Benvenuto Cellini (trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella) My Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 196.

Section 2
Religio Medici (1643), Part II

On War (1832), Book 1