Quotes about language (2943 quotes, page 22)

“According to mead, the primary phenomenon out of which language in the full human sense emerges is the gesture, especially the vocal gesture. The gesture sign (such as a dog's snarl) differs from such a nongestural sign as thunder in the fact that the sign vehicle is an early phase of a social act and the designatum a later phase of this act (in this case the attack by the dog). Here one organism prepares itself for what another organism - the dog - is to do by responding to certain acts of the latter organism as signs; in the case in question the snarl is the sign, the attack is the designatum, the animal being attacked is the interpreter, and the preparatory response of the interpreter is the interpretant.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 36

Dogs , Question , Sense , Animals

“Patel's presidential address to the Congress, 1931: No one would die of starvation in independent India. Its grain would not be exported. Cloth would not be imported by it. Its leaders would neither use a foreign language nor rule from a remote place 7,000 feet above sea level. Its military expenditure would not be heavy. Its army would not subjugate its own people or other lands. Its best-paid officials would not earn a great deal more than its lowest-paid servants. And finding justice in it would be neither costly nor difficult.”

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1950) Indian freedom fighter who forged united India

Gandhi, Rajmohan. Patel: A Life, p. 92

People , Justice , Sea , Clothes

“Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Ceti"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Truth , Music

“I commenced the study of the Chinese language at the University of Munich. I had then about 3 years in Germany, engaged in various studies. Happening to notice the announcement of a course of lectures on the language of the Chinese by Professor Neumman, the interest I have always taken in the people, induced me to employ an otherwise vacant hour in learning something of their tongue.”

Thomas Taylor Meadows (1815–1868) British sinologist and diplomatic interpreter from Chinese

Page 7 of "The Chinese and their Rebellions, viewed in connection with their national philosophy, ethics, legislation and administration, to which is added An Essay on Civilization and its present state in the East and West" https://books.google.com/books?id=dKEBAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR3&dq=The+Chinese+and+their+Rebellions,+viewed+in+connection+with+their+national+philosophy,+ethics,+legislation+and+administration,+to+which+is+added+An+Essay+on+Civilization+and+its+present+state+in+the+East+and+West&hl=en&sa=X&ei=x626UaDJKsnWyQHLmoG4BA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Chinese%20and%20their%20Rebellions%2C%20viewed%20in%20connection%20with%20their%20national%20philosophy%2C%20ethics%2C%20legislation%20and%20administration%2C%20to%20which%20is%20added%20An%20Essay%20on%20Civilization%20and%20its%20present%20state%20in%20the%20East%20and%20West&f=false

People , Study , Learning , Universe

“Two words of such a book, though possessing no peculiar signification, if met with in the dullest sentence, are enough: they call up, what has been finely termed, the "lightning of the mind." We feel an instantaneous kindness and reverence towards an author (together with a high opinion of his discrimination) who cites as it were the very language of our dreams—the secret converse of our own invisible spirit. We are almost startled at its being made public, and fancy that we have been at some time overheard reading. He is forthwith admitted a member of our heart's privy council. His hard words and bad reasoning are forgiven: we shut our ears to his angular periods—remembering only that his habits and desires, his sympathies, perceptions and enjoyments, are under the same master-key as our own—that he has struck into the same path, drank at the same brook, mused upon the same bank, and plucked almost the same leaf with ourselves.”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)

Secret , Books , Dreams , Feeling

“If to state this case is not to decide it, the law has departed further from the meaning of language than is appropriate for a government that is supposed to rule (and to be restrained) through the written word.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

United States v. Rodriguez-Moreno, 526 U.S. 275 (1998) (Scalia, dissenting).
1990s

Law

“Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 113

Intelligence , Speed

“Moral indignation, … the intervention into the affairs of others because we think them wicked, must necessarily be replaced by humanitarianism, which, using the language of therapy and healing, intervenes in what it perceives as the best interests and well-being of the individuals involved. Heresy or ungodliness become personal or social pathology.”

Jock Young (1942–2013) British sociologist and criminologist

“The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy,” Images of Deviance (1971), p. 32

Thinking , Personality

“Music is a world within itself
With a language we all understand,
With an equal opportunity
For all to sing, dance and clap their hands.”

Stevie Wonder (1950) American musician

Sir Duke
Song lyrics, Songs In The Key of Life (1976)

World , Music , Understanding , Singing

“I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not.”

Anaïs Nin book Under a Glass Bell

"Je suis le plus malade des Surrealistes"
Under a Glass Bell (1944)

World , Fear , Dreams , Feeling

“It's the religious aspects in which I feel most at home, in a way. No, I don't really feel at home in India anymore. I'm not physically comfortable in India most of the time-I like Chicago, I like snow. It's an irony that I should be an Indologist because I don't like hot climates. I don't like crowds. There are too many things about India that don't suit my physical makeup. And also, I hardly ever go to Bengal, so I don't have a language[ to speak. So I go as a visitor. I visit friends. To some extent, ironically, I'm more at home in India now because there are fabulous hotels with good food and people speaking English, it's like being in New York, but if I go to a village I can't talk to people. I don't know if I ever really was at home in India, but I love being there.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her comfort level staying in India.
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love , People , Food , Way

“The goal of mankind is knowledge.... Now this knowledge is inherent in man. No knowledge comes from outside: it is all inside. What we say a man "knows," should, in strict psychological language, be what he "discovers" or "unveils"; what man "learns" is really what he discovers by taking the cover off his own soul, which is a mine of infinite knowledge.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

Soul , Knowledge , Learning

“Do we want blanks, asterisks and exclamation marks which people can fill in with their own imaginations, or are we prepared and strong enough to tolerate, even if we do not approve, the strong Anglo-Saxon, realistic and vivid language?”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Defending record shop proprietor Christopher Seale against obscenity charges for displaying advertisements for Sex Pistols' LP Never Mind the Bollocks, Nottingham Magistrates Court (14 November 1977)

People , Imagination , Strong

“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Straits Times, 20 April 1987
1980s

People , Thinking , Personality

“For a long time one school of players favored the technique of stating side by side, developing in counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas, such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible synthesis. In general, aside from certain brilliant exceptions, Games with discordant, negative, or skeptical conclusions were unpopular and at times actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game had acquired at its height for the players. It represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one within itself — in other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had represented the life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion toward God, and had considered that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity. Similarly, the symbols and formulas of the Glass Bead Game combined structurally, musically, and philosophically within the framework of a universal language, were nourished by all the sciences and arts, and strove in play to achieve perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality. ”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Life , God , Hostility , World

“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 342

Death , People , World

“Let us see to it that in our schools, as far as possible, every week, some lessons from Scripture, in the language of the Scripture are learned.”

Wayland Hoyt (1838–1910) American Baptist Minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 572.

School , Learning

“Homogenization sterilizes. It's the sum of cultures and languages that makes humanity”

Pierre Bourgault (1934–2003) Canadian politician

L'homogénéisation stérilise. C'est la somme des cultures et des langues qui fait l'humanité.
La Culture. Écrits polémiques. Lanctôt Éditeur, 1996 p.130, tome 2

“Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark
To hint at a life to come.”

Langdon Smith Evolution

Evolution (1895; 1909)

Life

“To some extent, leaving the community was even harder than transitioning. I had no idea what I was getting into. I didn't know anyone, couldn't speak the language, and didn't have an education. I didn't know how to dress. I didn't know how to talk. I remember the first time walking into a Starbucks, I was like, 'OK, what's happening here?' The culture shock is just in every level, every way…. It's like being an immigrant in your own country.”

Abby Stein (1991) Trans activist, speaker, and educator

2017

Education , Way , Communication , Idea

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 213.

Nature

“I have the principles of an Englishman, and I utter them without apprehension or reserve… this is not the language of faction; let it be tried by that criterion, by which alone we can distinguish what is factious, from what is not— by the principles of the English constitution. I have been bred up in these principles, and I know that when the liberty of the subject is invaded, and all redress denied him, resistance is justifiable… the constitution has its political Bible, by which if it be fairly consulted, every political question may, and ought to be determined. Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights, form that code which I call the Bible of the English constitution. Had some of his Majesty's unhappy predecessors trusted less to the commentary of their Ministers, and been better read in the text itself, the glorious Revolution might have remained only possible in theory, and their fate would not now have stood upon record, a formidable example to all their successors.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

Speech in the House of Lords (22 January 1770), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), p. 98.

Fate , Question , Reading

“No other language than some soft sweet sounds
She had caught from the voices of the birds
When singing to the morning, and the notes
Sent from the waterfall, when, like a harp,
It held discourse in music with the wind.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The London Literary Gazette, 1823

Music , Bird , Singing

“In science by a fiction as remarkable as any to be found in law, what once been published even though it be in the Russian language, is spoken of as known, and it is too often forgotten that the rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory.”

John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919) English physicist

Lord Rayleigh (1884) as cited in: Brian Vickery (1958) Classification and indexing in science. Preface

Law , Science

“Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 166

“People cannot escape from the obligation of a statute by putting a private interpretation upon its language.”

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten (1830–1913) Anglo-Irish rower, barrister, politician and Lord of Appeal in Ordinary

Netherseal Colliery Co. v. Bourne (1889), L. R. 16 Ap. Ca. 247.

People

“The holy man, persuaded that they belonged to some idolatrous people and that in their own language they gave adherence to the Christian faith, invited them to receive baptism.
"I think," said he to them, "that you bathe often, for all the hollows of the rocks are full of pure water, and as I came to your assembly I saw several of you plunging into these natural baths. Now purity of body is the image of spiritual purity."
And he taught them the origin, the nature, and the effects of baptism.
"Baptism," said he to them, "is Adoption, New Birth, Regeneration, Illumination."
And he explained each of these points to them in succession.
Then, having previously blessed the water that fell from the cascades and recited the exorcisms, he baptized those whom he had just taught, pouring on each of their heads a drop of pure water and pronouncing the sacred words.
And thus for three days and three nights he baptized the birds.”

Anatole France book Penguin Island

Book I : The Beginnings, Ch. V : The Baptism Of The Penguins
Penguin Island (1908)

People , Faith , Birth , Nature

“Language became a colorless and as indistinct as the business suit which is now worm by everyone, by the scholar, by the businessman, by the professional killer. Being accustomed to a dry and dreary norm and sees in it an obvious sign of arrogance and aggression; viewing authority with almost religious awe he gets into a frenzy when he sees someone pluck the beard of his favorite prophet.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Paul Karl Feyerabend Science in a Free Society (1978), pg. 150.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Business

“All his tunk-a-tunks, his hoo-goo-boos — those mannered, manufactured, individual, uninteresting little sound-inventions — how typical they are of the lecture-style of the English philosopher, who makes grunts or odd noises, uses homely illustrations, and quotes day in and day out from Alice, in order to give what he says some appearance of that raw reality it so plainly and essentially lacks. These “tootings at the wedding of the soul” are fun for the tooter, but get as dreary for the reader as do all the foreign words — a few of these are brilliant, a few more pleasant, and the rest a disaster: “one cannot help deploring his too extensive acquaintance with the foreign languages”, as Henry James said, of Walt Whitman, to Edith Wharton.”

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

“Reflections on Wallace Stevens”, p. 129
Poetry and the Age (1953)

Quotes , Home , Soul , Reality

“What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language? An animal..”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

Knowledge , Animals

“C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Message to gmane.comp.version-control.git mailing list, 2007-09-07, Torvalds, Linus, 2007-09-22 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643,
2000s, 2007

Guy , Help

“I have friends among beggars
And can speak their language.
I have friends among rulers
And can understand their strategies.
So fear not, o stranger,
That you may be misunderstood,
Speak your heart of your trouble
And trust me to help solve it.”

Dilip Sankarreddy Business professional

Wanderings with Poetry (2007)

Fear , Understanding , Help , Heart

“The existence of antagonistic "conspiracies" was recognized by the defenders of religious and political views. Iconoclasts knew that images might distort the basic message of their creed (which consisted of words and resided in Holy Books). Church architecture and church music were adapted to the needs of the Holy Faith. Alternative styles were either fought or made part of religious PR. I conclude that our 'field of experience' is molded, overlaid, and 'conspired' against not just by language, but by numerous other patterns and institutions, many of them in mutual conflict. An inference from a style, a particular linguistic apparatus, or, more recently, from scientific beliefs, to a cosmology, corresponding ways of life and an all-embracing "spirit of the age therefore needs special support; it cannot be made as a matter of course.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend (1924–1994) Austrian-born philosopher of science

pg 28.
Conquest of Abundance (2001 [posthumous])

Life , Books , Age , Faith

“Let’s move on to the next major lie in my opening statement, the idea of Putin’s popularity in Russia. I could not begin to count the number of times I’ve been forced to address this myth, the persistence of which I again attribute to our lack of language to describe modern dictatorships. Terms like “polls” and “popularity” as applied to politicians in the free world have very different meanings in authoritarian regimes. I’m fond of asking in response to questions about Putin’s “popularity” if a restaurant is popular if it’s the only one in town and every other restaurant was burned to the ground.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

Lie , World , Idea , Question

“Examining the musical language of Prokofiev in a more detailed way, we must acknowledge that for him melody was always the most important element of music, one that determined the quality of the composition”

Boris Berman (1948) Russian/American musician

Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev: His Life and the Evolution of His Musical Language

Music , Way

“Critics of visual arts and of music describe in words — that is to say, a system of signs other than those made by brushes on canvas or chisels into stone or notes of music — those characteristics of painting or sculpture or music which can be described or analysed. Visual artists and composers can disregard critics on the ground that the medium of verbal criticism bears so indirect a relation to the medium in which they make something. Poets are in a different situation. With the development of so-called scientific methods of criticism they are made ever conscious that criticism of poetry is in the same medium of work as the art which they practise. “Close analysis” is useful to critics and readers. But for the poet there is the danger of disintegration of poetry into paraphrase, examination of technique, influences, all analysed in the language of criticism.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"Tradition-Bound Literature and Traditionless Painting"
The Struggle of the Modern (1963)

Art , Music , Painting

“As an artist, I am very familiar with how to show the details, how to transform them into a language people can understand. They [the government] know that the Internet is a strong force, unbearable for them.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

People , Understanding , Strong

“Luther's merit in literary history is of the greatest: his dialect became the language of all writing. They are not well written, these Four-and-twenty Quartos of his; written hastily, with quite other than literary objects. But in no Books have I found a more robust, genuine, I will say noble faculty of a man than in these. A rugged honesty, homeliness, simplicity; a rugged sterling sense and strength. He dashes out illumination from him; his smiting idiomatic phrases seem to cleave into the very secret of the matter. Good humor too, nay tender affection, nobleness and depth: this man could have been a Poet too! He had to work an Epic Poem, not write one.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Priest

Secret , Books , History , Sense

“The rhetorical process functioned in many areas other than speech: Curtius wrote about 'rhetorical landscape representations' while Serpieris speaks of 'la retorica al teatro' (the rhetorical use of theatrical space), and music historians have learned that the language and approach of musical theory in the Middle Ages were borrowed directly from medieval grammar and rhetoric.”

Thomas Binkley (1931–1995) lutenist

"The work is not the performance", Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music. (1997). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198165404.

Age , Music , Learning

“In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care; we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to man, to conduct man according to his condition; 'tis express, plain, and the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language; therefore let us again charge at it in this place”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

God

“But, whenever a portion of this facility we may suppose even the greatest Poet to possess, there cannot be a doubt that the language which it will suggest of him, must, in liveliness and truth, fall far short of that with is uttered by men in real life, under the actual pressure of these passions, certain shadows of which the poet thus produced, or feels to be produced, in himself. However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Life , Men , Truth , Feeling

“Just as the unleashing of ideas and myths in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cleared the way for endless changes in state and social structures, so the subsequent pinning down and splitting up of language into feudal states has now made it impossible for the citizen to participate seriously in society. The inviting humanist irony of the early days has given way to the off-putting rational cynicism and sloganeering of our time.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Way , Idea , Change , Time

“The history of the Democratic Party can be concisely captured by referring to its steadfast allegiance to the four Ss. Slavery, Secession, Segregation, and Socialism. During the Obama presidency we have seen how hard old habits die, even for a black man whose race was the long-time victim of Democratic Party's bone-deep authoritarianism. Under this Democratic president we have seen a war waged on several fronts against America's young. Indeed, the Democrats' historic taste for and belief in slavery have resurfaced with a vengeance and indiscriminately under the Obama administration, whether white, black, yellow, red, male, or female America's young are dying and being forced to work for Obama and his lieutenants as they seek to maintain their party's hold on political power. How so? Well, America has never had a president and administration so eager to kill unborn Americans. Even with post-1973 science having proved irrefutably that the unborn are human beings, and even though American law always has defined them as U. S. citizens, Obama and his colleagues have strengthened at every point they could the absurd notion that unborn humans are the chattel property of the woman who bears them, and so can be disposed of, that is, murdered, at her whim. And, in what must be considered a masterpiece of Orwellian language, Obama and his team, and most Democrats since 1973, describe this federal government-issued license to kill as a woman's 'right', a means by which she manifests her equality with men. They then damn any one who questions the logic, sanity, or justice of this argument as an 'extremist'. Only in an America in which a political entity as devoted to the four 'Ss' as the Democratic Party could opposition to the cold-blooded murder of fellow citizens unable defend themselves be identified by the country’s best-educated as 'extremism'. If this is indeed a right, it is a right gives each woman the right to be a slave-owner and a Nazi. Such a 'right' really is no different than the rights sanctioned by the Dred Scott decision and the Nuremberg laws, each of which legally defined certain categories of people out of the human race in order to enslave or kill them. Since 1973, the application of this 'right' has produced precisely the same results as Dred Scott and the Nuremberg laws, though in numbers so immense, 55 million and climbing, that they make those acts seem rather tame and minimally destructive of humans.”

Michael Scheuer (1952) American counterterrorism analyst

As quoted in "Obama and his party offer America's young … death, misery, and slavery" http://non-intervention.com/1143/obama-and-his-party-offer-america%E2%80%99s-young-%E2%80%A6-death-misery-and-slavery/ (21 November 2013), by M. Scheuer, Michael Scheuer's Non-Intervention.
2010s

Men , War , People , Education

“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”

Cyril Connolly book Enemies of Promise

Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 2: The Mandarin Dialect (p. 13)

Feeling

“This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 103

Truth , Search

“If a human being is isolated from other humans for a month or more, and is confined to a small area geographically and a small range of activities, his interest in his surroundings and its minutiae increase radically…. Further, if a confined, isolated human is allowed brief contacts with other humans even without a shared language, he begins to find their presence comforting, and a pleasant relief from the "evenness" of his surroundings. If these humans controls his only sources of food as well as his sources of intraspecies stimulation, he mat adapt to their demands in subtle and not so subtle ways. He may, given time, learn their language, take on their beliefs, etc. When we catch a dolphin and put him alone in a small tank, we are imposing similar "solitary confinement" structures on him. Maybe we can thus capture his loyalty and his initiative.”

John Lilly (1915–2001) American physician

Man and Dolphin (1961), p.190-191; as quoted in The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (2012), by D. Graham Burnett, p.578-579

Food , Way , Learning , Time

“We can now return to the distinction between language and symbolism. A symbol is language and yet not language. A mathematical or logical or any other kind of symbol is invented to serve a purpose purely scientific; it is supposed to have no emotional expressiveness whatever. But when once a particular symbolism has been taken into use and mastered, it reacquires the emotional expressiveness of language proper. Every mathematician knows this. At the same time, the emotions which mathematicians find expressed in their symbols are not emotions in general, they are the peculiar emotions belonging to mathematical thinking.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 268

Mathematics , Thinking , Time

“A few important Muslim leaders regretted that Australian society, as they experienced it, defied their beliefs and preachings. In their eyes it was decadent and irreligious. And yet one century earlier, a host of Australian churchgoers would have agreed with the mainstream Muslim suspicion of alcohol, drugs, pornography, party-going, scantily clad women, blasphemous language, suicide, homosexuality and the Sabbath. It was the Christians who, in the following four generations, relaxed their views on these social questions. They became more tolerant at a time when sections of Islam were becoming less tolerant.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Story of Australia's People: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia (2016)

Women , Alcohol , Question , Suicide

“Once one learns how to speak a language, the authority of the language has fulfilled its aim, but is not thereby overcome. Authority remains as the entry to the inquiry one has undertaken. It is not overcome or passed by so much as it is actualized, fulfilled. That is why philosophic reformations seem too often to be nested within what it is they seek to reform. Insofar as it begins from its predecessor, every attempted reformation is only the confession of the authority of its predecessor's discourse. The appearance of abrupt 'revolutions' in philosophy is produced only by ignoring, sometimes ingenuously, the authority of previous speech.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

Learning , Appearance

“We must pass through the barriers of language and race, of geography and religion, of custom and tradition and we must build on a common foundation.”

Vincent Massey (1887–1967) Governor General of Canada

Address at a Citizenship Ceremony, Winnipeg Manitoba, May 20, 1955
Speaking Of Canada - (1959)

Religion

“When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling.”

Christopher Nolan (1970) British–American film director, screenwriter, and producer

Chistopher Nolan and David Fincher featurette on Movieweb http://www.movieweb.com/movie/the-tree-of-life-2011/christopher-nolan-and-david-fincher-featurette

Nature , Thinking

“The process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme symbolic expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language conceals and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its claim to validity. It is the root of civilization, the dynamic code of civilization's alienated nature. As the paradigm of ideology, language stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold civilization together. It remains for us to clarify what forms of nascent domination engendered this justification, made language necessary as basic means of repression”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Elements of Refusal (1988)

Life , Nature

“By the logical syntax of a language, we mean the formal theory of the linguistic forms of that language -- the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the development of the consequences which follow from these rules. A theory, a rule, a definition, or the like is to be called formal when no reference is made in it either to the meaning of the symbols (for examples, the words) or to the sense of the expressions (e. g. the sentences), but simply and solely to the kinds and order of the symbols from which the expressions are constructed.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Source: Logical Syntax of Language, 1934/1937, p. 1

Sense

“The visual power of the phonetic alphabet is the translate other languages into itself is part of its power to invade right hemisphere (oral) cultures.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1980s, Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan) (1988), p. 74

Parting

“Conceptual graphs are system of logic based on the existential graphs of Charles Sanders Peirce and the semantic networks of artificial intelligence. The purpose of the system is to express meaning in a form that is logically precise, humanly readable, and computationally tractable. With their direct mapping to language, conceptual graphs can serve as an intermediate language for translating computer-oriented formalisms to and from natural languages. With their graphic representation, they can serve as a readable, but design and specification language.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Source: Conceptual graphs for knowledge representation, 1993, p. 3-51. cited in: Bernhard Ganter, Gerd Stumme, Rudolf Wille (2005) Formal Concept Analysis: Foundations and Applications. p. 87

Intelligence , Nature

“A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English.”

Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) President of Harvard

[Z. Elmarsafy, A. Bernard, D. Attwell, Debating Orientalism, https://books.google.com/books?id=VP6ARP2m-D0C&pg=PA82, 13 June 2013, Springer, 978-1-137-34111-2, 82]

Literature , Universe

“Thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language--shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language—in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) American linguist

Source: Language, thought and reality (1956), p. 252.

Family , Law , Communication , Nature

“Languages shape the way we think, or don't.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Search & Replace in sequences http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/baafc407b4bd66f5 (Usenet article).
Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Way , Thinking

“The evolution of life is analogous to the evolution of language. For example, there are several languages based on the Roman alphabet of only 26 letters. Yet by arranging these in different orders, we’ve added several hundred thousand words to English since the 5th century, and many of them were completely new. The principle is the same in genetics. There are millions of named and classified species of life, all of them based on a variable arrangement of only four chemical components. For another example, we know that Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all evolved from Latin, a vernacular which is now extinct. Each of these newer tongues emerged via a slow accumulation of their own unique slang lingo –thus diverging into new dialects, and eventually distinct forms of gibberish such that the new Romans could no longer communicate with either Parisians or Spaniards. Similarly, if we took an original Latin speaking population and divided them sequestered in complete isolation over several centuries, they might still be able to understand each other, or their jargon may have become unintelligible to foreigners. But they won’t start speaking Italian or Romanian because identical vocabularies aren’t going to occur twice.”

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

"8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Life , Communication , Understanding

“Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.”

Clifford Odets (1906–1963) Playwright, screenwriter, director, actor

Mr. Bonaparte, in Golden Boy (1937), Act I, sc. ii

Music , Country

“In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and this reflexive twist is inseparable from the convenience and universal applicability of the device. Here we already have enough to draw the interest of the philosopher of language.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Donald Davidson. "Quotation" in: Theory and Decision, March 1979, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, pp 27-40; Cited by Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, (2010), p. 4

Universe , Drawing

“Because you could not translate the word apartheid into the more universal language of English, the wrong connotation was given to it.”

P. W. Botha (1916–2006) South African prime minister

As cited in Dictionary of South African Quotations, Jennifer Crwys-Williams, Penguin Books 1994, p. 22

Universe

“What the Universities have mainly done—what I have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading—to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

Books , Imagination , Thinking , Learning

“The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world."”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

On Pantheism as quoted in Faiths of Famous Men in Their Own Words (1900) by John Kenyon Kilbourn; also in Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays (2007), p. 40
Essays

God , World

“No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But…the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Reading Mozart's Music", p.43.

Music , Past

“Malraux writes in a language in which there is no way to say "perhaps" or "I don't know," so that after a while we grow accustomed to saying it for him.”

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

"Malraux and the Statues at Baumberg," Art News (December 1953) [p. 180]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Way

“To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 71

Hope , Soul , Suicide , Affliction

“I was also not willing to accept the orders of the leaders regarding my personal life or the personal lives of the other members. I had refused to allow the government to tell me how to live, so why should I allow the leadership of Progressive Labor to reorient my life?… Open criticism of the leadership dictums did not sit well with them, and they immediately began to accuse me of ‘trying to create a splinter group.’… The leaders became so paranoid over the issue of their ‘public image’ that they told members to shave their mustaches, wear coats and ties, forget the cowboy boots, be careful whom they are seen with, stay away from people who take dope, date only certain girls, attend classes regularly, and watch their language in public. Strange concerns, indeed, for Communists who at times attempted to pose as libertarians!”

Phillip Abbott Luce (1935–1998)

Source: The New Left: The Resurgence of Radicalism Among American Students (1966), p. 44

Life , People , Girl , Time

“Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.”

J. L. Austin (1911–1960) English philosopher

Source: Philosophical Papers (1979), p. 273.

“Computer science is still a young field. The first computers were built in the mid 1940s, since when the field has developed tremendously. Applications from the early years of computerization can be characterized as follows: the programs were quite small, certainly when compared to those that are currently being constructed; they were written by one person; they were written and used by experts in the application area concerned. The problems to be solved were mostly of a technical nature, and the emphasis was on expressing known algorithms efficiently in some programming language. Input typically consisted of numerical data, read from such media as punched tape or punched cards. The output, also numeric, was printed on paper. Programs were run off-line. If the program contained errors, the programmer studied an octal or hexadecimal dump of memory. Sometimes, the execution of the program would be followed by binary reading machine registers at the console.”

Hans van Vliet (1949) Dutch computer scientist

Source: Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2007, p. 2

Error , Nature , Problem , Study

“I realized that our time in the White House would form the foundation for who they would become and how well we managed this experience could truly make or break them. That is what Barack and I think about every day as we try to guide and protect our girls through the challenges of this unusual life in the spotlight, how we urge them to ignore those who question their father’s citizenship or faith. How we insist that the hateful language they hear from public figures on TV does not represent the true spirit of this country. How we explain that when someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, 2016 Democratic National Convention (2016)

Life , Hate , Faith , Girl

“To me the entire uselessness of such rules^as practical guides lies in the inherent vagueness of the word "reasonable," the absolute impossibility of finding a definite standard, to be expressed in language, for the fairness and the reason of mankind, even of Judges. The reason and fairness of one man is manifestly no rule for the reason and fairness of another, and it is an awkward, but as far as I see, an inevitable consequence of the rule, that in every case where the decision of a Judge is overruled, who does or does not stop a case on the ground that there is, or is not, reasonable evidence for reasonable |men, those who overrule him say, by implication, that in the case before them, the Judge who is overruled is out of the pale of reasonable men.”

John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge (1820–1894) British lawyer, judge and Liberal politician

Dublin, &c. Rail. Co. v. Slattery (1878), L. R. 3 App. Ca. 1197.

Men , Decision

“Slowly he turned the pages, scanning the pictures and the text for a repetition of the combination B-O-Y. Presently he found it beneath a picture of another little ape and a strange animal which went upon four legs like the jackal and resembled him not a little. Beneath this picture the bugs appeared as: A BOY AND A DOG There they were, the three little bugs which always accompanied the little ape.
And so he progressed very, very slowly, for it was a hard and laborious task which he had set himself without knowing it — a task which might seem to you or me impossible — learning to read without having the slightest knowledge of letters or written language, or the faintest idea that such things existed.
He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs book Tarzan of the Apes

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

Books , Dogs , Boy , Idea

“I can say, if I wish, extremely mean and hateful things. I have read a great many religious papers and discussions and think that I now know all the infamous words in our language.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Hate , Thinking , Reading

“Prose must be written in language that is well understood by its readers. The world would hardly miss those literary works that are mastered by only half-a-dozen pundits.”

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894) Bengali writer

Peary Chand Mitra's Place in Bengali Literature (as quoted in Bengal Online http://bengalonline.sitemarvel.com/bankimchandra.asp)

World

“I thought… that the fact that in characterizing truth for a language it is necessary to put words into relations with objects was enough to give some grip for the idea of correspondence; but this now seems to me a mistake. The mistake is in a way only a misnomer, but terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion, and so it is here. Correspondence theories have always been conceived as providing an explanation or analysis of truth, and this, a Tarski-style theory of truth, certainly does not do.”

Donald Davidson (philosopher) (1917–2003) scriitor amator

Donald Davidson (1990, p. 135), as cited in: Simon Evnine (1991) Donald Davidson. p. 137

Truth , Way , Idea

“Galt was the first writer to show the effects of the burgeoning industrial revolution, making him the first political novelist in the English language, and though his reputation has been overshadowed by Scott and Hogg, he is now recognised as one of the great writers of the age.”

John Galt (novelist) (1779–1839) British writer

Carl MacDougall, "Reformers and radicals in Scottish literature" http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/writingscotland/learning_journeys/reformers_and_radicals/.
Criticism

Age

“When language is used without true significance, it loses its purpose as a means of communication and becomes an end in itself.”

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) German psychiatrist and philosopher

Man in the Modern Age (1933)

Communication

“If I could express the same thing with words as with music, I would, of course, use a verbal expression. Music is something autonomous and much richer. Music begins where the possibilities of language end. That is why I write music.”

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) Finnish composer of the late Romantic period

Interview with Berlingske Tidende, June 10, 1919. http://www.sibelius.fi/english/omin_sanoin/ominsanoin_16.htm

Music

“The reduction of the tactile qualities of life and language constitute the refinement sought in the Renaissance and repudiated now in the electronic age.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 272

Life , Age

“My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets — no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!”

Philip Roth book Portnoy's Complaint

Source: Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Ch. 4: "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life"

Life , God , Communication

“Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Other Inquisitions

"The Nightingale of Keats"
Other Inquisitions (1952)

Men , Error , Feeling , Knowledge

“59: In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“The wide distribution of the Satem or Iranian group to the south and west of Asia shows that the Nordics in great numbers conquered the aboriginal inhabitants of these countries and imposed on them the Aryan speech. They invented the caste system to maintain the purity of their blood. In fact, the Hindu word "varna" means both color and caste. In spite of all their efforts, however, the conquering invaders died out almost completely in India and Persia — leaving behind them only their language, and, in some cases, their religion.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

Religion , Color , Effort , Country

“A dictionary is a reference book that lists the words of one or more languages, usually in alphabetical order, along with information about their spelling, pronunciation, grammatical status, meaning, history, and use.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 108

Books , History

“My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Letter to Henry Brandon after an interview with him, explaining his opposition to interviews; quoted by Brandon in As We Are (1961)
Letters and interviews

Help

“An Egyptian priest…. plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, A Mouthful of Air: Language and Languages, Especially English (1992)

“Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”

J. G. Ballard book Crash

"Introduction" to the French edition (1974) of Crash (1973); reprinted in Re/Search no. 8/9 (1984)
Crash (1973)

Thinking , Science

“The musical language which made the classical style possible is that of tonality, which was not a massive, immobile system but a living, gradually changing language from its beginning. It had reached a new and important turning point just before the style of Haydn and Mozart took shape.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Part I. Introduction. 1. The Musical Language of the Late Eighteenth Century
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

Music , Change

“Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals… And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 11

“ Language performs an essentially social function; it helps us to get along together, to communicate and achieve a great measure of concerted action. Words are signs which have significance by convention, and those people who do not adopt the conventions simply fail to communicate. They do not "get along" and a social force arises which encourages them to achieve the correct associations. ”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Language: Science and Aesthetics, p.69

People , Communication , Help

“Making art means not only using languages, but also creating new ones. To do this, new tools are indispensable. Even returning to more traditional languages such as linear poetry or narration, after being enriched by the experience of hypertext, hypermedia and multimedia, allows us to rethink the older forms of expression and transfer the lessons of the new media into even the more traditional modalities of language, such as narrative, for example.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 48

Art

“The Bible declares blasphemy to be a very serious offense, because any society which begins by profaning God and His authority will soon profane all things. Nothing will be sacred. No authority will stand. The alternative to authority is total terror by the power of State. This is why, as I’ve pointed out more than once, when the authority of God is destroyed, and when the doctrine of Creation was replaced with the doctrine of Evolution, Marx and Engels congratulated one another in that now their position was established. The foundations of all godly authority were shattered when God was no longer viewed as the creator. His Law, His Word, His person became thereby irrelevant to creation. If the Lord God of scripture did not make the Heavens and the earth and all things therein to the last atom, His Word does not govern creation. If Creation is a product of Evolution, then no law outside of itself can govern it. So the alternative to the authority of God is total terror by the power of State. Where there is no authority, there is soon no justice, because men then no longer speak the same moral languages of law and authority. The respect for God’s authority establishes communication and healthy dissent, the kind of dissent which thrives in an anarchist situation is the dissent of increasing evil, violence and destruction. Godly dissent is constructive, not destructive, and its goal is justice and holiness.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Blasphemy (n. d.)

Men , God , Justice , Law

“I am an unrepentant book lover, and so soaked am I in the love of books that I feel – poor twentieth-century shopkeeper that I am – I feel that Pliny is a man I know, for all the eighteen centuries and more that lie between us. Pliny used to say (you will see it in a translation I have on my shelves) that no book was so bad that some good might be got out of it, and that is my feeling. I – and Pliny – born and bred so differently, feel the same about books and it gives me a flattering sense of rightness – sitting here in this shop among books that Pliny could not have imagined – books written in a language which was not then evolved – the thought makes me feel thrilled. There is no other word for it, but I dare not tell it to anyone. It is an astonishing secret to me that I must enjoy alone.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 30

Love , Lie , Secret , Books

“The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.”

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) American playwright and novelist

Writers at Work interview (1958)

Way , Future

“Which I wish to remark,—
And my language is plain,—
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar.”

Bret Harte (1836–1902) American author and poet

The Heathen Chinee (1870)

Way

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication , Literature , Knowledge , Sense

“Even if we come from different sides of the world, speak different languages. Even if we eat too many chips, or rice balls. Even if we have different tastes in games. Every one of us, here today, is identical, in the most important way. Each one of us has the heart of a gamer.”

Satoru Iwata (1959–2015) Japanese video game programmer and businessman

2005 GDC Keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrEosZKzp4&t=8m6s

World , Way , Game , Heart

“Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later.”

Gene Wolfe book The Death of Dr. Island

"The Death of Doctor Island", Universe 3 (1973), ed. Terry Carr, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980). Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Wolfe Archipelago (1983), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Men , God , Communication

“The earlier views, those of Hobbes or Locke for instance, saw language as an instrument, and understood meaning in terms of designation. Discovering the meaning of words is finding what ideas or things they stood for. … By contrast, a hermeneutical view requires a very different conception. If we are partly constituted by our self-understanding, and this in turn can be very different according to the various languages which articulate for us a background of distinctions of worth, then language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives. Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources.”

Charles Taylor (1931) Canadian philosopher

Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: 1985), pp. 9-10

World , Way , Feeling , Idea

Quotes about language page 22

Quotes about language
page 22