“We never choose which words to use, for as long as they mean what they mean to mean, we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.”

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 58.

and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

p. 58
Philosophical Papers (1979)

Source: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

Foreword to the 1946 edition
Brave New World (1932)
Context: Unless we choose to decentralize and to use applied science, not as the end to which human beings are to be made the means, but as the means to producing a race of free individuals, we have only two alternatives to choose from: either a number of national, militarized totalitarianisms, having as their root the terror of the atomic bomb and as their consequence the destruction of civilization (or, if the warfare is limited, the perpetuation of militarism); or else one supra-national totalitarianism, called into existence by the social chaos resulting from rapid technological progress in general and the atomic revolution in particular, and developing, under the need for efficiency and stability, into the welfare-tyranny of Utopia. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

§ 43, this has often been quoted as simply: The meaning of a word is its use in the language.
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

Source: Watchmen

Letter published in the Manchester Advertiser (3 March 1911), quoted in A People's History of the United States (1980) page 345.
Context: Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.… You ask for votes for women. What good can votes do when ten-elevenths of the land of Great Britain belongs to 200,000 and only one-eleventh to the rest of the 40,000,000? Have your men with their millions of votes freed themselves from this injustice?

Emile, or On Education (1762), Book III

Source: The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Chapter 6