Quotes about dictionary (148 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The dictionary is the holy book of the geniuses. It's the only way that you can learn new word(s) daily.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Learning , Books , Way

“The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the Unabridged Dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.”

Edwin Grant Conklin (1863–1952) American biologist and zoologist

Quoted in: Cliffe Knechtle (1986) Give Me an Answer, p. 70

Life

“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”

Винс Ломбарди (1913–1970)

Motivational , Success , For Team , Heartbreaking

“The dictionary is the only book that's not required to reference anybody.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Books

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
(on Ernest Hemingway”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“A great memory does not make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be called grammar.”

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) English cleric and cardinal

Discourse VIII, pt. 10.
The Idea of a University (1873)

Memory

“Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“That does it," said Jace. "I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year."
"Why?" Isabelle said.
"So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace and Isabelle, pg. 155
Variant: "That does it, I'm going to get you a dictionary for Christmas this year."
"Why?"
"So you can look up 'fun.' I'm not sure you know what it means."
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Christmas

“The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it 'nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!”

Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking-Glass

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

“We're so special, when you look in the dictionary under short bus, there's a group picture of us,'' Stevie Rae said, sounding weak but definately alive.”

Kristin Cast book Untamed

Source: Untamed

“I have been accused of a habit of changing my opinions … I am not myself in any degree ashamed of having changed my opinions. What physicist who was already active in 1900 would dream of boasting that his opinions had not changed during the last half century? In science men change their opinions when new knowledge becomes available; but philosophy in the minds of many is assimilated rather to theology than to science. … The kind of philosophy that I value and have endeavoured to pursue is scientific, in the sense that there is some definite knowledge to be obtained and that new discoveries can make the admission of former error inevitable to any candid mind. For what I have said, whether early or late, I do not claim the kind of truth which theologians claim for their creeds. I claim only, at best, that the opinion expressed was a sensible one to hold at the time when it was expressed. I should be much surprised if subsequent research did not show that it needed to be modified. I hope, therefore, that whoever uses this dictionary will not suppose the remarks which it quotes to be intended as pontifical pronouncements, but only as the best I could do at the time towards the promotion of clear and accurate thinking. Clarity, above all, has been my aim.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Preface to The Bertrand Russell Dictionary of Mind, Matter and Morals (1952) edited by Lester E. Denonn
1950s

Men , Truth , Dreams , Hope

“According to the dictionary, to administer is to govern, or to manage a public or private business. It means, therefore, to seek to make the best possible use of the resources available in achieving the goal of the enterprise. Administration includes, therefore, all the operations of the enterprise. But as a result of the usual way of organizing things to facilitate the running of the business, a certain number of activities constitute the special departments; the technical department, the commercial department, the financial department, etc., and the scope of the administrative department is found to be reduced accordingly.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: L’exposé des principes généraux d’administration, 1908, p. 911

Way , Business

“The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Perversion of India's Political Parlance (1984)

Education , Religion

“For a writer, to change languages is to write a love letter with a dictionary.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Anathemas and Admirations (1987)

Love , Change

“Some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Observe these examples:

Freundschaftsbezeigungen.
Dilletantenaufdringlichkeiten.
Stadtverordnetenversammlungen.
These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper any time and see them marching majestically across the page,—and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. "Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in my museum. In this way I have made quite a valuable collection. When I get duplicates, I exchange with other collectors, and thus increase the variety of my stock. Here are some specimens which I lately bought at an auction sale of the effects of a bankrupt bric-a-brac hunter:

Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen.
Alterthumswissenschaften.
Kinderbewahrungsanstalten.
Unabhaengigkeitserklaerungen.
Wiederherstellungsbestrebungen.
Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen.
Of course when one of these grand mountain ranges goes stretching across the printed page, it adorns and ennobles that literary landscape,—but at the same time it is a great distress to the new student, for it blocks up his way; he cannot crawl under it, or climb over it or tunnel through it. So he resorts to the dictionary for help; but there is no help there. The dictionary must draw the line somewhere,—so it leaves this sort of words out. And it is right, because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed.”

Mark Twain book A Tramp Abroad

A Tramp Abroad (1880)

Music , Way , Imagination , Mountain

“The good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance ("Good Readers and Good Writers", p. 3).”

Vladimir Nabokov book Lectures on Literature

Lectures on Literature (1980)

Imagination , Sense , Memory , Chance

“Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word "impossible" is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise. Between Barbicane's proposition and its realization no true Yankee would have allowed even the semblance of a difficulty to be possible. A thing with them is no sooner said than done.”

Jules Verne book From the Earth to the Moon

Rien ne saurait étonner un Américain. On a souvent répété que le mot "impossible" n’était pas français; on s’est évidemment trompé de dictionnaire. En Amérique, tout est facile, tout est simple, et quant aux difficultés mécaniques, elles sont mortes avant d’être nées. Entre le projet Barbicane et sa réalisation, pas un véritable Yankee ne se fût permis d’entrevoir l’apparence d’une difficulté. Chose dite, chose faite.
Source: From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Ch. III: Effect of the President's Communication

People

“On one’s path through life, it shall be nearly impossible to find and acquire complete virtue. Aristotle listed his twelve virtues and other philosophers have noted even more personality traits to describe the virtuous. But one, morality jumps off the page which within itself is defined distinctively different between various religious, social value systems and nationalities. Morality is defined by our conscience, not the dictionary.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1996

Personality , Life

“I just read them for fun."
"Dictionaries?"
"Yes."
"That doesn't sound like fun. That sounds awful."
"Awful used to mean 'full of awe.' The same meaning as awesome. I learned that from a dictionary."
He blinked.
"See?" She said. "Fun.”

Max Barry (1973) Australian writer

Source: Lexicon

Learning , Reading

“I am sure people tell you this constantly but if you looked up 'incredibly beautiful' in the dictionary there would be a picture of you.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

People , Beauty

“Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment."

Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?"

"I bet you'll tell me."

" 'If you're reading this, you are one.' "

You're a riot.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Grip of the Shadow Plague

Books , Reading , Hurt

“Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

Love , Reading

“The point,' Ms. Conyers continued, "is that no word had one specific definition. Maybe in the dictionary, but not in real life.”

Sarah Dessen Lock and Key

Source: Lock and Key

Life

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.
Source: The Book Thief

Love , Children

“We are all imprisoned by the dictionary. We choose out of that vast, paper-walled prison our convicts, the little black printed words, when in truth we need fresh sounds to utter, new enfranchised noises which would produce a new effect.”

Mervyn Peake book Titus Groan

Source: Titus Groan

Truth

“Since then I've always thought that under rape in the dictionary it should tell the truth. It is not just forcible intercourse; rape means to inhabit and destroy everything.”

Alice Sebold book Lucky

Source: Lucky

Truth

“I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Reading

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Source: Le Potomak : Précédé d'un Prospectus 1916

Literature

“I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Hope , Behavior , Time

“I'm going to be so normal that when people look up normal in the dictionary, my name will be there.”

Wendy Mass A Mango-Shaped Space

Source: A Mango-Shaped Space

People

“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Literature

“If you look up "charming" in the dictionary, you'll see that it not only has references to strong attraction, but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Secret Life of Prince Charming

Strong

“I'm pretty sure that if you looked up the word "nuts" in the dictionary, you'll find my picture. Just another fun feature of my mutant-birdkid-freak package.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: School's Out—Forever

“I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.”

Zadie Smith book NW

Source: NW

“Western dictionaries define secularism as absence of religion but Indian secularism does not mean irreligiousness. It means profusion of religions.”

Shashi Tharoor (1956) Indian politician, diplomat, author

Religion

“Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence?"
"Yes, Sage" he said patiently. "We use it all the time with art,… That, and I know how to use a dictionary”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

Art , Time

“When you look up 'hilarious' in the dictionary, there's a picture of you.”

Jonathan Safran Foer (1977) Novelist

“The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

1848
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

Evil

“Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.”

David Levithan The Lover's Dictionary

Source: The Lover's Dictionary

Love , Life

“When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

I Have A Pony (1985)

Reading

“Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”

Julio Cortázar book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Reality

“In the dictionary, next to the word stress, there is a picture of a midsize mutant stuck inside a dog crate, wondering if her destiny is to be killed or to save the world. Okay, not really. But there should be.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

World , Dogs

“Sometimes words just don't get you there… don't let you say all the stuff from deep in your heart, stuff that no dictionary has a name for.”

Bill Condon (1955) American film director

Source: A Straight Line to My Heart

Heart

“me: why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset?
gideon: i will file a lawsuit against the dictionaries first thing tomorrow morning. we're going to tear merriam a new asshole and throw webster inside of it.”

David Levithan book Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Source: Will Grayson, Will Grayson

Tear

“Reckless,” he said. “You know, when I first showed up at the Institute, Alec called me reckless so many times that I went and looked it up in the dictionary”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

Time

“Mister Dictionary has failed us yet again.”

Keith Olbermann (1959) American sports and political commentator

Catch Phrases
Source: http://www.sportscenteraltar.com/phrases/phrases.asp Sports Center Catchphrases

“He commenced a systematic search of the cabin; but his attention was soon riveted by the books which seemed to exert a strange and powerful influence over him, so that he could scarce attend to aught else for the lure of the wondrous puzzle which their purpose presented to him.
Among the other books were a primer, some child's readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

Source: Tarzan of the Apes (1912), Ch. 7 : The Light of Knowledge

Books , Search

“The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A … language with … no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves.”

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) Scottish poet

Sorley MacLean, June 1943, quoted in Krause, Corinna. "Translating Gaelic Scotland" https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/beae/ab4c968782c1c0eeb7ee0f9459d009fab52d.pdf and "Gaelic Scotland – A Postcolonial Site?" https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_41178_en.pdf
Letters and interviews

People , Thinking , Universe , Chance

“Once early in the morning, at two or three in the morning, when the master was asleep, the books in the library began to quarrel with each other as to which was the king of the library. The dictionary contended quite angrily that he was the master of the library because without words there would be no communication at all. The book of science argued stridently that he was the master of the library for without science there would have been no printing press or any of the other wonders of the world. The book of poetry claimed that he was the king, the master of the library, because he gave surcease and calm to his master when he was troubled. The books of philosophy, the economic books, all put in their claims, and the clamor was great and the noise at its height when a small low voice was heard from an old brown book lying in the center of the table and the voice said "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."”

Louis Nizer (1902–1994) American lawyer

And all of the noise and the clamor in the library ceased, and there was a hush in the library, for all of the books knew who the real master of the library was.
"Ministers of Justice", Address delivered at the Eighty-Second Annual Convention of the Tennessee Bar Association at Gatlinburg, June 5, 1963; published in 31 Tennessee Law Review 1 (Fall 1963), p. 19.

Books , World , Communication , Lying

“The higher commander who goes to Field Service Regulations for tactical guidance inspires about as much confidence as the doctor who turns to a medical dictionary for his diagnosis.”

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (1883–1950) senior officer of the British Army

III – The Soldier and the Statesman.
"Generals and Generalship" (1939)

Confidence

“It may be noted that some of the Christian correspondents objected to Ram Swarup’s article being published in The Times of India. The plea sounds strange, to say the least. The Christians in this country own and control a large-sized press which includes several daily newspapers and many periodicals. The language which is used in this media vis-a-vis Hinduism is not always decorous; quite often, it is intemperate. Besides, the Christians get ample space in the press which is supposed to be owned and controlled by the Hindus. It is only once in a while that an article critical, of Christian dogmas and/or missions, gets through. That, too, when the editor concerned finds that the facts cited and the conclusions drawn deserve the attention of his countrymen. The Christians who object to such articles being published at all have to think calmly and coolly whether their attitude reflects tolerance or otherwise. They have been telling us for many years now that they want and are prepared for a dialogue. We hope that the word “dialogue” in their current dictionary does not mean a monologue, as it did in past.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Hope , Thinking , Time , Past

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Women , Men , Disease , Sex

“You know that prudery is only the other side of prurience. The words are even on the same page in the dictionary.”

Isaac Asimov book The Gods Themselves

Section 3, Chapter 12, p. 244
The Gods Themselves (1972)

“The word science of administration has been used. There are many who object to the term. Now if by science is meant a conceptual scheme of things in which every particularity coveted may be assigned a mathematical value, then administration is not a science. In this sense only astro-physics may be called a science and it is well to remember that mechanical laws of the heavens tell us nothing about the color and composition of the stars and as yet cannot account for some of the disturbances and explosions which seem accidental. If, on the other hand, we may rightly use the term science in connection with a body of exact knowledge derived from experience and observation, and a body of rules or axioms which experience has demonstrated to be applicable in concrete practice, and to work out in practice approximately as forecast, then we may, if we please, appropriately and for convenience, speak of a science of administration. Once, when the great French mathematician, Poincaré, was asked whether Euclidean geometry is true, he replied that the question had no sense but that Euclidean geometry is and still remains the most convenient. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a science is, among other things, a particular branch of knowledge or study; a recognized department of learning.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 660-1

Law , Color , Star , Mathematics

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.”

Ambrose Bierce book The Devil's Dictionary

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

“Dinosaurs had two problems: Number one, the climate change. Number two, was probably worse; people hunted them; they killed them. No, they did not call them dinosaurs then though. They called them dragons. The word "dinosaur" was not made up until 1841. So for most of human history these creatures were called dragons. Dinosaur is not even in the dictionary in 1891. For most of human history they were known as dragons. Dragons are mentioned in the Bible 34 times.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People , History , Problem , Change

“On July 4 1983, I met with officials of the Committee for the Reform of the Written Language in Peking. They informed me that they were working on another revision of their word list and that they would consider making an alphabetized dictionary based on it. Their eyes lit up when I told them I would gladly pay a small fortune for such a reference tool. An alphabetically ordered dictionary would certainly be worth such a sum because of the huge amount of time it would save in my research. Naturally, I hope that the Chinese will be able to produce this type of dictionary at a cost that will make it widely available.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Hope , Nature , Time

“What I liked about Greece was […] the impressive force of the language itself, unconfined by dictionaries, spoken in the streets, in cafés and in the country.”

Peter Levi (1931–2000) writer, archaeologist, sometime Jesuit priest

Peter Levi. The Hill of Kronos. 1980.

Country

“The God Delusion by the atheist writer Richard Dawkins, is remarkable in the first place for having achieved some sort of record by selling over a million copies. But what is much more remarkable than that economic achievement is that the contents – or rather lack of contents – of this book show Dawkins himself to have become what he and his fellow secularists typically believe to be an impossibility: namely, a secularist bigot. (Helpfully, my copy of The Oxford Dictionary defines a bigot as ‘an obstinate or intolerant adherent of a point of view’).”

Antony Flew (1923–2010) British analytic and evidentialist philosopher

Flew's review of The God Delusion

God , Books

“On the French view of international politics: "According to my dictionary, the word 'ally' comes from the Old French. Very Old French, I'd say. For the New French, the word has a largely postmodern definition of 'duplicitous charmer who undermines you at every opportunity.'”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

The Australian, 23 February 2007

“Even after proper discount is made for false propaganda, the evidence is indisputable that every invading army perpetrates atrocity, so much so that war may correctly be defined as atrocity. Reference to various standard dictionaries reveals the following definition of atrocity: "A deed of violence or savagery; great cruelty or reckless wickedness; extreme cruelty; enormous wickedness."”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Must We Go to War? (1937)

War , Falseness

“Off and on during my life, I have passed sleepless nights in making up lists of the dozen or so books a person might choose to take along if suddenly marooned on a desert island. This is a relatively easy game for serious readers: At least half the titles would be recognized classics — the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, a good dictionary, that sort of thing. But occasionally I have made the challenge a little more difficult: "What if you could take just one book?"”

Michael Dirda (1948) American literary critic

Washington Post article [concerning Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists]: Arts & Living, 21 Oct 2007.

Life , Books , Game , Personality

“It would seem the incoming Trump administration plans to handle its affairs — domestic and foreign — in a manner that meets the dictionary definition of a “rogue state” as one “that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way.””

Dana Milbank (1968) American journalist

Trump’s one consistent policy: Chaos https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-one-consistent-policy-chaos/2016/12/06/f1a5a5ae-bbf7-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html?utm_term=.f664c9ebc888, The Washington Post (December 6, 2016)

Way

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

Love , Books , Way , Search

“The dictionary defines "economics" as "a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services." Here is another definition of economics which I think is more helpful in explaining how economics relates to software engineering.
Economics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations.
This definition of economics fits the major branches of classical economics very well.
Macroeconomics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations on a national or global scale. It deals with the effects of decisions that national leaders make on such issues as tax rates, interest rates, foreign and trade policy.
Microeconomics is the study of how people make decisions in resource-limited situations on a more personal scale. It deals with the decisions that individuals and organizations make on such issues such as how much insurance to buy, which word processor to buy, or what prices to charge for their products or services.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: Software engineering economics. (1984), p. 4

People , Thinking , Decision , Study

“As a working Sinologist, each time I look up a word in my Webster's or Kenkyusha's I experience a sharp pang of deprivation. Having slaved over Chinese dictionaries arranged in every imaginable order(by K'ang-hsi radical, left-top radical, bottom-right radical, left-right split, total stroke count, shape of successive stroke, four-corner, three corner, two-corner, Kuei-hsieh, ts'ang-chieh, telegraphic code, rhyme tables, phonetic keys, and so on ad nauseam), I have become deeply envious of specialists in those languages, such as Japanese, Indonesian, Hindi, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, and so forth, which possess alphabetically arranged dictionaries.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Imagination , Time , Success

“In this room, the salamander was squashed between the pages of the rhyming dictionary, thereby changing poetry forever. Here, Salome walked around with a big red fish held high up over her head. Old Father spanked her with a ballet slipper, sending her to bed without milk or honey. Dance was changed in this room, too.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Fish , Change , Dance

“The word … becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions.”

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) Philosopher, scholar

Source: "Discourse in the Novel" (1935), pp. 293-294

People

“Nature is just a dictionary, you hunt in it for words.... you find in it the elements which make a phrase or a story; but nobody would regard a dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the term. Besides, nature is far from being always interesting from the point of view of the effect of the whole... If each detail is perfect in some way, the union of these details seldom gives an effect equivalent to that which arises, in the work of a great artist, from the total composition.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Delacroix, quoted by Paul Signac: in D'Eugene Delacroix au Neo-impressionnisme, Chap. I.; as quoted by John Rewald, in Georges Seurat', a monograph https://ia800607.us.archive.org/23/items/georges00rewa/georges00rewa.pdf; Wittenborn and Compagny, New York, 1943. p.10 + note 15
Quotes, undated

Way , Nature , Sense , Perfection

“Facts are not science — as the dictionary is not literature.”

Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) American university teacher (1879-1962)

Fischerisms (1944)

Literature , Science

“Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist’s gift for clairvoyance- the word gift not being the right one, for it implies a kind of superiority. Clairvoyance is simply the part of profession: the essential leaps of imagination, the need to fix one’s mind on detail-to the point of obsession, in fact, so as not to lose the thread and to give in one’s natural laziness. All the, is tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to “flashes of intuition concerning events past and future”, as defined by Larousse dictionary under “clairvoyance.””

Patrick Modiano (1945) French writer

Source: The Search Warrant (2000), pp. 47-48

Exercises , Imagination , Nature , Past

“A Jew, in the dictionary, is one who is descended from the ancient tribes of Judea, or one who is regarded as a descendant from that tribe. That's what it says in the dictionary, but you and I know what a Jew is: One Who Killed Our Lord… there should be a statute of limitations for that crime.
in Lenny Bruce Without Tears 1972”

Lenny Bruce (1925–1966) comedian and social critic

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151327/

“I was born ostentatious. They will list my name in the dictionary someday. They will use Imeldific to mean ostentatious extravagance.”

Imelda Marcos (1929) Former First Lady of the Philippines

Quoted in the Associated Press (1998).

“"True science has no belief," says Dr. Fenwick, in Bulwer-Lytton's Strange Story; "true science knows but three states of mind: denial, conviction, and the vast interval between the two, which is not belief, but the suspension of judgment." Such, perhaps, was true science in Dr. Fenwick's days. But the true science of our modern times proceeds otherwise; it either denies point-blank, without any preliminary investigation, or sits in the interim, between denial and conviction, and, dictionary in hand, invents new Graeco-Latin appellations for non-existing kinds of hysteria!”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky book Isis Unveiled

Source: Isis Unveiled (1877), Volume I, Chapter VII

Science , Time

“'What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth — or in heaven — do I mean by "integral"? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: "comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness."”

Ken Wilber (1949) American writer and public speaker

Short definition, tall order.
An Integral Spirituality

“An independent nation cannot function without its own national language. That English should be replaced by our own language as a patriotic necessity. But so far as University education is concerned at any rate, it appears prudent to delay the change-over until our linguistic consolidation has proceeded further and our own languages have become more adequately equipped with the machinery of modern learning,- encyclopedias, dictionaries, reference books, treatises, text books, and a widely intelligible vocabulary of technical terms of modern science … the most elaborate code of ethical conduct that anyone could draw up cannot go much beyond the simple exhortation of The Upanishad’s Satyam vada, Dharmam cara [speak the truth, act nobly]. These should be the watch-words of our public and private life.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his convocation address at the Sri Venkateshwara University, at Tirupathi, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life , Truth , Books , Education

“SPAN ID=All_that_we> All that we have to do is to pick them out of the dictionary and string them in the right order…. </SPAN”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics, p.68

“Bullett's poem criticising Cosmo Gordon Lang for his speech on Edward VIII's abdictation. Quoted in Ross McKibben, Classes and Cultures 1918–51, (2000), Oxford University Press, also in Anthony Jay, Lend Me Your Ears:Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations,(2010), Oxford”

Gerald Bullett (1893–1958) British writer

Quotes , Universe

“Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the 'official truth'. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as 'functionaires', functionaries, not journalists. Many journalists become very defensive when you suggest to them that they are anything but impartial and objective. The problem with those words 'impartiality' and 'objectivity' is that they have lost their dictionary meaning. They've been taken over… [they] now mean the establishment point of view… Journalists don't sit down and think, 'I'm now going to speak for the establishment.' Of course not. But they internalise a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

The Progressive, Interview with John Pilger http://www.progressive.org/nov02/intv1102.html, November 2002

Truth , World , Problem , Thinking

“Let's hear the music first and foremost,
And that means no more one-two-one-twos…
Something more vague instead, something lighter
Dissolving in air, weightless as air.
When you choose your words, no need to search
In strict dictionaries for pinpoint
Definitions. Better the subtle
And heady Songs of Imprecision.”

Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) French poet

De la musique avant toute chose,
Et pour cela préfère l'Impair
Plus vague et plus soluble dans l'air
Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.
Il faut aussi que tu n'ailles point
Choisir tes mots sans quelque méprise:
Rien de plus cher que la chanson grise
Où l'Indécis au Précis se joint.
Source: "Art poétique", from Jadis et naguère (1884), Line 1; Sorrell p. 123

Music , Search

“The world 'bubble' is in the dictionary, as is the word 'peacock,' the word 'vacation,' and the words 'the,' 'author's,' 'execution,' 'has,' 'been,' 'cancelled,' which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear. So, if you were to read the dictionary, rather than this book, you could skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' and read about things that wouldn't keep you up all night, weeping and tearing your hair out. But this book is not a dictionary, and if you were to skip the parts about 'nervous' and 'anxious' you would be skipping the most pleasant parts of the entire story. Nowhere in this book will you find the words 'bubble,' 'peacock,' 'vacation,' or, unfortunately for me, anything about an execution being cancelled.”

Daniel Handler book The Ersatz Elevator

Lemony Snicket
The Ersatz Elevator (2001)

Books , World , Tear , Reading

“Goethe said, “The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing”; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: “I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary.””

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.
"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13
No Other Book: Selected Essays (1999)

World , Reading

“If only there were a lexicographer of Liang Shih-ch'iu's ability who also had the perspicuity to arrange his dictionary by sound rather than radical! … No wonder most of us are so sour and gray by the time we reach fifty! The amount of time consumed and the spirit expended in this sort of meaningless, not to mention destructive, type of activity is beyond calculation.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

Time

“The most significant feature of our histories, however, is the religious zeal felt or exhibited by the swordsmen of Islam before and after the “infidels” who resisted “were sent to hell”, the Brahmans massacred or molested or expelled, idols desecrated, temples demolished, and mosques raised in their stead. The prophet of Islam appears in a dream and bids a sultãn to start on the “holy expedition”, leaving no doubt that the “victory of religion” was assured. Amîr Khusrû was very eloquent about the transformation that was taking place. When the hordes of Alãu’d-Dîn Khaljî sacked the temple of Somnath, he exulted, “The sword of Islãm purified the land as the Sun purifies the earth.” His enthusiasm broke all bounds when the same hordes swept over South India: “The tongue of the sword of the Khalifa of the time, which is the tongue of the flame of Islãm, has imparted light to the entire darkness of Hindustãn by the illumination of its guidance… and several capitals of the gods of the Hindus in which Satanism had prevailed since the time of Jinns, have been demolished. All these impurities of infidelity have been cleansed by the Sultãn’s destruction of idol-temples, beginning with his first expedition to Deogîr, so that the flames of the fight of the law illumine all these unholy countries… God be praised!” One wonders whether the poet of Islam is being honoured or slandered when he is presented in our own times as the pioneer of Secularism. Or, perhaps, Secularism in India has a meaning deeper than that we find in the dictionaries or dissertations on political science. We may not be much mistaken if, seeing its studied exercise in blackening everything Hindu and whitewashing everything Islamic, we suspect that this Secularism is nothing more than the good old doctrine of Islam in disguise.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume II (1993)

God , Religion , Law , Dreams

“Ludicrous concepts…like the whole idea of a "war on terrorism". You can wage war against another country, or on a national group within your own country, but you can't wage war on an abstract noun. How do you know when you've won? When you've got it removed from the Oxford English Dictionary?”

Terry Jones (1942–2020) Welsh comedian, screenwriter, actor, film director and author

The Observer http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,901052,00.html, February 23, 2003.

War , Idea , Country

“We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.”

John Cage (1912–1992) American avant-garde composer

Quote of John Cage: the last lines of his 'Autobiographical Statement', April, 1990 http://www.johncage.org/autobiographical_statement.html
1990s

People , School , Music , Change

“What I set myself to do was this, to write a sort of grammar of thirteenth-century architecture, and to illustrate it with carefully measured details. I moreover resolved, when I did measure details or buildings, to do the part I wanted, and not to waste time by trying to make a finished drawing by means of the surroundings. The plan of the book fell through, for I had scarcely been at work two months before the advertisement of M. Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary appeared, and I then continued tho drawings for my own instruction and without any intention of publication.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

William Burges, Architectural Drawings, London, 1870. p. 1; As cited in American Architect and Building News. 1881. Vol. 9. p. 236

Books , Appearance , Time , Parting

“Now that I can see it's the queen's new clothes
Now that I can hear all your poison prose
Now that I can talk with my tongue unfroze
I'm not so sure of Santa or the buck tooth fairy
There are no words for me inside your dictionary”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Your Dictionary".
Apple Venus Volume 1 (1999)

Clothes

“We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.”

Jorge Luis Borges book The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.
As translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
Variant: We can go further; we suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.

God , Secret , Sense , Universe

“"Groping" and "muddling through" is usually described as a solution by trial and error…. a series of trials, each of which attempts to correct the error committed by the preceding and, on the whole, the errors diminished as we proceed and the successive trials come closer and closer to the desired final result…. we may wish a better characterization…"successive trials" or "successive corrections" or "successive approximations."… You use successive approximations when… looking for a word in the dictionary… A mathematician may apply the term… to a highly sophisticated procedure… to treat some very advanced problem… that he cannot treat otherwise. The term even applies to science as a whole; the scientific theories which succeed each other, each claiming a better explanation… may appear as successive approximations to the truth.
Therefore, the teacher should not discourage his students from using trial and error—on the contrary, he should encourage the intelligent use of the fundamental method of successive approximations. Yet he should convincingly show that for… many… situations, straightforward algebra is more efficient than successive approximations.”

George Pólya (1887–1985) Hungarian mathematician

George Pólya, Mathematical Discovery: On Understanding, Learning, and Teaching Problem Solving (1962)

Truth , Error , Intelligence , Problem

“Me?! What? I don’t know, unless I must go to the dictionary and learn what a crook is. I’ve never been a crook. … I'm saying I'm not a crook, I have never been a crook. I will never be a crook.”

Jacob Zuma (1942) 4th President of South Africa

In reply to the question 'Are you a crook?', from BBC Panorama http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/7243095.stm interviewer Fergal Keane, 11 February 2008

Learning

“I'm sure if we open up the dictionary, we could prove that with semantics that are various, we can prove that there is a definition of slavery that absolutely fits the bill there, when I'm talking about a bankrupt country that will owe somebody something down the line if we don't change things that is, we will be shackled.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

CNN Interview with Jake Tapper [2013-11-12, THE LEAD WITH JAKE TAPPER, Jake, Tapper, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1311/12/cg.01.html]
2013

Change , Country

“Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Vol. II, p. 406
Letters to and from Dr. Samuel Johnson

“By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness.... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory.... Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.”

Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay

A Short History of Decay (1949)
Variant: By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness... I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory... Let “desire” be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Life , World , Dreams , Hope

“The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world.”

Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970) American Christian radical

"Christian Anarchism, a Definition"

World , Christ , Dependency

“If you believe in God, if you believe in miracles, then you believe in magic. You believe in magic. People argue against that all of the time, but that’s actually true. If you look up a collection of dictionaries, online it is easy to do. Open up a bunch of them, and see where they all agree, find the points in the context where all of the dictionaries agree. You will discover that if you compare the definitions between a miracle and magic, you will see that they are both the ‘evocation of supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural events in ways which are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics, meaning they are physically impossible.’ That’s what both miracle and magic mean. So miracle is the same things as magic in the same way a boat is a yacht is if it is big enough.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Exclusive Interview with Aron Ra – Public Speaker, Atheist Vlogger, and Activist https://conatusnews.com/interview-aron-ra-past-president-atheist-alliance-america/, Conatus News (May 17, 2017)

God , People , Law , Way

“As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.”

Charles de Lint (1951) author

"Tallulah" in Dreams Underfoot : The Newford Collection (2003), p. 399

People