Quotes about language

A collection of quotes on the topic of language, use, other, word.

Quotes about language

“Conditioned like sheep in a flock, they have only managed to say “beee”, which translated into martial language would be “Yes, sir.””

José Baroja book El lado oscuro de la sombra y otros ladridos

“Sometimes I can't explain or speak with words. It really feels a little frustrating. But in skating I can use all languages, for all the people. I can do a part of the performance for every country, every people.”

Yuzuru Hanyu (1994) Japanese figure skater (1994-)

Other quotes, 2019 Source: Interview after the freeskate at Skate Canada 2019, as transcribed by the International Skating Union, published on 28 October 2019 on their official YouTube-Channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guVNCyGL1M.

People, Country, Feeling, Parting

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Context: Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Truth, Appearance

“Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Foreword, 'Tales of Transformation: English Translation of Tagore's Chitrangada and Chandalika', Lopamudra Banerjee, (2018). https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DQPD8F4/ From Prose

Chance

“Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.”

Rumi (1207–1273) Iranian poet

“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

World

“I am from there. I am from here.
I am not there and I am not here.
I have two names, which meet and part,
and I have two languages.
I forget which of them I dream in.”

Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer

Dreams, Parting, Forgetting

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

In his first meeting with Werner Heisenberg in early summer 1920, in response to questions on the nature of language, as reported in Discussions about Language (1933); quoted in Defense Implications of International Indeterminacy (1972) by Robert J. Pranger, p. 11, and Theorizing Modernism : Essays in Critical Theory (1993) by Steve Giles, p. 28
Context: We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

“I can't relate to lazy people. We don't speak the same language. I don't understand you. I don't want to understand you.”

Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player

Understanding, People, Relation ships

“The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all.”

Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) logician, mathematician, and philosopher of mathematics

People, Understanding, Thinking

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

Life, Art, Music, Way

“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) German philosopher

“Look, my friend. I don't speak the language here, I've got no money, the food stinks, there's no rice, no beans. I'd rather be arrested in Brazil than stay in this dump of a country.”

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945) Brazilian politician, 35th president of Brazil

Lula da Silva (1975), Cited in: Emir Sader, ‎Ken Silverstein (1991) Without Fear of Being Happy. p. 41
After being advised to stay in the United States when his brother was arrested in Brazil as a communist subversive.

Money, Food, Country

“We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood. To hate people because they were born in another country, because they speak a different language, or because they take a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human…. Let us have but one end in view: the welfare of humanity.”

John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) Czech teacher, educator, philosopher and writer

World, Hate, People, Country

“Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.”

Karl Lagerfeld (1933–2019) German fashion designer

Fashion, Reality, Clothes

“Love has a language that transcends all languages, all barriers and all distance.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

During his 2015 Mexico Cruade - "TB Joshua Gathers 200,000 In Mexico" http://www.nigerianeye.com/2015/05/tb-joshua-gathers-200000-in-mexico.html Nigerian Eye (May 14 2015)

Love

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

"Introduction: The Missing Ink", in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2002), p. 2

Feeling

“To those who say derogatory things about colonialism, I would say colonialism is a wonderful thing. It spread civilization to Africa. Before it they had no written language, no wheel as we know it, no schools, no hospitals, not even normal clothing.”

Ian Smith book The Great Betrayal

The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith, Africa's Most Controversial Leader
First published in June 1997.

School, Clothes

“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.”

Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Quoted in Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157, and in The Truth of Science : Physical Theories and Reality (1997) by Roger Gerhard Newton, p. 176
Context: What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

Way, Reality, Learning

“Photography is not only an art, it is an international language that everybody understands.”

NasserTone (1994) Nasser Ali Albahrani is a director, cinematographer, photographer, producer, & YouTuber, who was born on April 3…

Amasi Program, Sharjah TV Interview (March 1, 2016)

Understanding, Art

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Source: The Waves

Lovers

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

Life

“It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse

Women, Freedom

“language is never neutral”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

“As a fraction of the lifespan of the universe as measured from the beginning to the evaporation of the last black hole, life as we know it is only possible for one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, of a percent (10^-84). And that's why, for me, the most astonishing wonder of the universe isn't a star or a planet or a galaxy. It isn't a thing at all. It's an instant in time. And that time is now. Humans have walked the earth for just the shortest fraction of that briefest of moments in deep time. But in our 200,000 years on this planet we've made remarkable progress. It was only 2,500 years ago that we believed that the sun was a god and measured its orbit with stone towers built on the top of a hill. Today the language of curiosity is not sun gods, but science. And we have observatories that are almost infinitely more sophisticated than those towers, that can gaze out deep into the universe. And perhaps even more remarkably through theoretical physics and mathematics we can calculate what the universe will look like in the distant future. And we can even make concrete predictions about its end. And I believe that it's only by continuing our exploration of the cosmos and the laws of nature that govern it that we can truly understand ourselves and our place in this universe of wonders.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

Conclusion in Wonders of the Universe - Destiny

Life, God, Law, Star

“Of course, we all know that our own reality depends on the structure of our consciousness; we can objectify no more than a small part of our world. But even when we try to probe into the subjective realm, we cannot ignore the central order…In the final analysis, the central order, or 'the one' as it used to be called and with which we commune in the language of religion, must win out.”

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) German theoretical physicist

Werner Heisenberg as quoted in Quirks of the Quantum Mind, p. 175, ICRL Press, ISBN 1936033062

World, Religion, Communication, Reality

“When you speak in His presence about your past sins, He does not even understand your language. Only the present and the future have any interest for Him... I have committed crimes and have blood on my conscience. I told Jesus about it again and again. But because He had long ago washed all this away, there was no possibility of communication between us. He did not understand what I was talking about.”

Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001) Romanian Christian minister of Jewish descent

If Prison Walls Could Speak (1972)

Communication, Understanding, Past, Future

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.”

Karl Marx book The German Ideology

The German Ideology (1845/46)
Context: The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i. e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conception, ideas, etc. — real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

Life, Men, Idea

“Different languages and cultures have added more confusions to the understanding of these holy scriptures.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Understanding

“: A philosopher is a man in the street who speaks the same street language. He has to speak from personal experience and try to make simple spirits understand his way of life.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Personality, Understanding, Way, Life

“Fear not because your prayer is stammering, your words feeble, and your language poor. Jesus can understand you.”

J.C. Ryle (1816–1900) Anglican bishop

Fear, Understanding

“For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.”

T.S. Eliot book Four Quartets

Variant: For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

()
Source: Four Quartets

New Year

“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.”

Martin Luther (1483–1546) seminal figure in Protestant Reformation

God, Music

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

George Orwell book 1984

"Politics and the English Language" (1946)
Source: 1984
Context: But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Context: All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

“Music is the universal language of mankind — poetry their universal pastime and delight.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow book Outre-Mer

Outre-Mer.

Music, Universe

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Source: Politics and the English Language (1946)

“There is no language without deceit.”

Italo Calvino book Invisible Cities

Source: Invisible Cities

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.”

Bjarne Stroustrup book The C++ Programming Language

Bjarne Stroustrup's FAQ: Did you really say that?, 2007-11-15 http://www.stroustrup.com/bs_faq.html#really-say-that, Source: The C++ Programming Language

People

“All language is but a poor translation.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Life, Imagination

“We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

Oscar Wilde book The Canterville Ghost

Source: The Canterville Ghost http://www.oscarwildecollection.com/savile/canterville.c1.html (1887). For history and analysis of the quote see Common Language http://oscarwildeinamerica.org/quotations/common-language.html.

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Source: The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

People, Travel, Memory, Country

“The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Perfection

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

"Talking," in A Lover's Discourse (1977)

“Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Source: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: Full Text of 1916 Edition

Life, Reality

“No nation can ever hope to obtain full intellectual stature or eminence without first releasing, the mental processes, of its people from the yoke of a foreign language as the medium of thought and expression.”

Fatima Jinnah (1893–1967) Pakistani dental surgeon, biographer, stateswoman and one of the leading founders of Pakistan

Speech at Inauguration of Urdu Degree College, Karachi, June 1949 [citation needed]

People, Hope

“In the name of Indian national life, in the name of religion, I appeal to all in each of the two countries who hold position…let them begin each in their own community to work untiringly towards this end: boldly to repudiate feelings of hatred and intolerance, actively to condemn and suppress acts of violence and aggression, earnestly to strive to exorcise suspicions…I appeal in the name of national life because communal tension is eating into it as a canker…I appeal in the name of religion because I can appeal to nothing nobler, and because religion is the language of the soul, and it is a change of soul that India needs today.”

Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax (1881–1959) British politician

Speech as Viceroy of India (1926), quoted in Birkenhead, Halifax (Hamish Hamilton, 1965), pp. 223-234
Viceroy of India

Life, Religion, Feeling, Soul

“I sing in the language of the Heart. It's an invented language that I've had for a very long time. I believe I started singing in it when I was about 12. Roughly that time. And I believed that I was speaking to God when I sang in that language.”

Lisa Gerrard (1961) Australian musician, singer and composer

God, Singing, Time, Heart

“The word anti-Semitism is another word which should be eliminated from the English language. "Anti-Semitism" serves only one purpose today. It is used as a smear word. When so-called or self-styled Jews feel that anyone opposes any of their objectives they discredit their victims by applying the word anti-Semite or anti-Semitic through all the channels they have at their command and under their control. I can speak with great authority on that subject. Because so-called or self-styled Jews were unable to disprove my public statements in 1946 with regard to the situation in Palestine, they spent millions of dollars to smear me as an anti-Semite hoping thereby to discredit me in the eyes of the public who were very much interested in what I had to say. Until 1946 I was a little saint to all so-called or self-styled Jews. When I disagreed with them publicly on the Zionist intentions in Palestine I became suddenly Anti-Semite No. 1.”

Benjamin H. Freedman (1890–1984) American businessman

Facts are Facts (1954)

Hope, Feeling

“On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator’s style.”

Suman Pokhrel (1967) Nepali poet, lyricist, playwright, translator and artist

Sense, Chance

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

W. H. Auden (1907–1973) Anglo-American poet

Squares and Oblongs, in Poets at Work (1948), p. 170

Love, Passion, Personality

“One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

The Prevention of Literature (1946)

“The language of communication will always need to be renewed.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Truth to Power, 2009

Communication

“Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.”

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) Philosopher, scholar

Source: "Discourse in the Novel" (1935), p. 294

“If children had teachers for judgment and eloquence as they have for languages, if their memory was exercised less than their energy or their natural genius, if instead of deadening their vivacity of mind we tried to elevate the free scope and impulses of their souls, what might not result from a fine disposition? As it is, we forget that courage, or love of truth and glory are the virtues that matter most in youth; and our one endeavor is to subdue our children’s spirits, in order to teach them that dependence and suppleness are the first laws of success in life.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), pp. 185-186.

Love, Life, Children, Truth

“Language is at the heart of poetry and it is difficult to commandeer words which elicit no personal echo. Of what we can speak, we need not be silent.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Interview with Eugene O'Connell 'Cork Literary Review vol xiii 2009
Poetry Quotes

Heart, Personality

“Concept art is first of all an art of which the material is concepts, as the material of e. g. music is sound. Since concepts are closely bound up with language, concept art is a kind of art of which the material is language.”

Henry Flynt (1940) American musician

Henry Flynt: "Essay: Concept Art." (1961) In: La Monte Young (ed.) An Anthology, 1963.

Art, Music

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Feeling, Failure, Drink

“These are the limits of the scientific method and of logic itself, insofar as they must rely on language. Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurrences of our everyday world. But when we approach realities of another scale, these words can become obstacles.”

Hubert Reeves (1932) Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science

Hubert Reeves (1984) Atoms of silence: an exploration of cosmic evolution Massachusetts Institute of Technology. p. 37

World, Reality

“Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc. But it is the most important of all these systems.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 16 ; Partly cited in; Geza Revesz, The Origins and Prehistory of Language, London 1956. p. 126

Idea

“The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

" New Textbooks for the "New" Mathematics http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2362/1/feynman.pdf", Engineering and Science volume 28, number 6 (March 1965) p. 9-15 at p. 14 Paraphrased as "Precise language is not the problem. Clear language is the problem." Context: The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language. The desire is to have the idea clearly communicated to the other person. It is only necessary to be precise when there is some doubt as to the meaning of a phrase, and then the precision should be put in the place where the doubt exists. It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.Pure mathematics is just such an abstraction from the real world, and pure mathematics does have a special precise language for dealing with its own special and technical subjects. But this precise language is not precise in any sense if you deal with real objects of the world, and it is only pedantic and quite confusing to use it unless there are some special subtleties which have to be carefully distinguished.

Problem

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance... Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of... (their) rights. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine (May 1994)

Imagination

“Right from his early days in the Andamans, Vinayak encouraged people to speak in Hindi....Till then, government records were maintained in Urdu, and even Hindi was written in the Persian script. Vinayak strongly advocated the implementation of the Devanagari script as it was the one in which the oldest language of the subcontinent, Sanskrit, was written. During his interactions with local merchants in his capacity as the foreman of oil collections, Vinayak passed this zeal on to them too. Through his influence, a girls’ school that was started in the Andamans began a compulsory teaching of Hindi in the Devanagari script.”

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) Indian pro-independence activist,lawyer, politician, poet, writer and playwright

Vikram Sampath - Savarkar, Echoes from a Forgotten Past

Girl, School, People

“In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel?”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Love, Making love, Beer

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Truth, Appearance, Making love

“England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control — that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

George Orwell book England Your England

Part I : England Your England, § III
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)

Family, Silence, Memory, Relation ships

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

Bad luck, People, Suffering, Knowledge

“Imagine that one not very fine day two or three of your states in the Southwest, in the space of 24 hours, declare themselves independent of the U.S.... declare themselves a fully sovereign nation, decreeing that Spanish will be the only language. All English-speaking residents, even if their ancestors have lived there for 200 years, have to take a test in the Spanish language within one or two years and swear allegiance to the new nation. Otherwise they will not receive citizenship and be deprived of civic, property and employment rights. What would be the reaction of the United States? I have no doubt that it would be immediate military intervention. Today Russia faces precisely this scenario.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Interview With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on the New Russia and Ukraine (May 1994)

Imagination

“He who speaks a bit of a foreign language has more delight in it than he who speaks it well; pleasure goes along with superficial knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

Pleasure, Knowledge

“… language is never innocent.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

“One can not understand language because language cannot understand itself; does not want to understand”

Novalis (1772–1801) German poet and writer

Understanding

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)

Dead

“Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.”

Deborah Levy (1959) British writer

Source: Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

World, Way, Feeling

“Silence is the only language god speaks.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Source: Dime-Store Alchemy

God, Silence

“I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.”

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) Advertising executive

People

“I speak only one language, and it is not my own.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Source: Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin

“In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: The Color of Magic

“The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings.”

Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Family, Friendship, For Friend, For Bestfriend

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

Mark Twain book The Innocents Abroad

Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 61.
Context: The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Understanding

“If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Intelligence

“Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”

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

“Dont speak of tomorrow. Let the music speak to us tonight, in a happier language than ours.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Variant: Let the music speak to us of tonight, in a happier language than our own.
Source: The Woman in White

Music

“Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Beauty, Peaceful, Love, Art

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

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)

Beauty, Feeling, Reading

“What a terrible mistake, thought Drogo, perhaps everything is like that — we think there are beings like ourselves around us and instead there is nothing but ice and stones speaking a strange language; we are on the point of greeting a friend but our arm falls inert, the smile dies away because we are completely alone.”

Dino Buzzati book The Tartar Steppe

Source: The Tartar Steppe

Smile, Thinking

“You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse”

William Shakespeare The Tempest

Source: The Tempest

“Everyone smiles in the same language.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Cute, Smile

“Laughter is the language of the soul.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Soul, Laughter

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Unsourced in The Philosophy of Mark Twain: The Wit and Wisdom of a Literary Genius (2014) by David Graham
Disputed

Relationship

“Language disguises thought.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it”

Christopher Morley (1890–1957) American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet

Life, Men

“Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine?”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Training

“I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

Pleasure, Beauty, Soul, Imagination

“The ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Remarks to Future Farmers of America http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1988/072888c.htm (28 July 1988) 1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)

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