1,125 Language Quotes

It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word 'terrorist' is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.

Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

One sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

Written words differ from spoken words in being material structures. A spoken word is a process in the physical world, having an essential time-order; a written word is a series of pieces of matter, having an essential space-order.

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

The music that of common speech but slanted so that each detail sounds unexpected as a sharp inserted in a simple scale.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention.

Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.

Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

The funniest line in English is 'Get it?' When you say that, everyone chortles.

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term 'globalization' to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become 'anti-globalist.' This is simply vulgar propaganda, like the term 'anti-Soviet' used by the most disgusting commissars to refer to dissidents. It is not only vulgar, but idiotic. Take the World Social Forum, called 'anti-globalization' in the propaganda system -- which happens to include the media, the educated classes, etc., with rare exceptions. The WSF is a paradigm example of globalization. It is a gathering of huge numbers of people from all over the world, from just about every corner of life one can think of, apart from the extremely narrow highly privileged elites who meet at the competing World Economic Forum, and are called 'pro-globalization' by the propaganda system. An observer watching this farce from Mars would collapse in hysterical laughter at the antics of the educated classes.

I speak to everyone in the language they understand. That isn't being slick. It's being clear

There are 'white niggers'; I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time, if you want to use that word.

LEXICOGRAPHER - A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Be not the slave of Words.

The soldier is poor without the poet's lines, His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood. And war for war, each has its gallant kind. How simply the fictive hero becomes the real; How gladly with proper words the solider dies, If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

'Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation' yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.

A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find someone who's forgotten words so I can have a word with him?...

'Was the cow crossed?' 'No, your worship, it was an open cow.'

It doesn't quite work in an Aussie accent does it? 'Talk the hand...because the face has fucked off!'

(On the Australian National Anthem): It's just not the most inspiring anthem in the world is it? I mean, the words are alright: 'Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free', except for that last line 'our home is girt by sea.' 'Cos 'girt' means surrounded. How many of you have ever used the word 'girt' in a sentence in your life? Seriously, you never see a policeman and 4 police cars outside your house saying : 'Come out of there with your hands up, we have you girt.'

Freedom and honour! For ten long years Hitler and his coadjutor have manhandled, squeezed, twisted, and debased these two splendid German words to the point of nausea, as only dilettantes can, casting the highest values of a nation before swine. They have sufficiently demonstrated in the ten years of destruction of all material and intellectual freedom, of all moral substance among the German people, what they understand by freedom and honour. The frightful bloodbath has opened the eyes of even the stupidest German - it is a slaughter which they arranged in the name of 'freedom and honour of the German nation' throughout Europe, and which they daily start anew.

I think the vocabulary of the average Sun reader is something like 10,000 words.

Text-messaging or The Sun, these are perfect Orwellian ways of limiting the vocabulary and thus limiting the consciousness.

We have a right to think that truth with a capital letter is relative. But facts are facts. And whoever says that the sky is blue when it is gray is prostituting words and preparing the way for tyranny.

The ending of the words is the Word Abrahadabra.

Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan...

Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd; All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.

'Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams - 'Of something felt, like something here; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no language may declare.'

Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...

The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all 'knowledge' is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.

[A Game:] We begin by asking the meaning of every word uttered:Then we ask the meaning of the words used in the definitions and, and this process is continued for no more than ten or fifteen minutes until the victim begins to speak in circles...

Anne Burrell, just putting down a piece of that dough right on the grill. It's very thin, and I bet it's got a sexy name.

What am I looking at? I want to eat you like a tossed fucking salad!

Rock-a-bye baby, on the tree top Your mother's a whore, I ain't your pop.

If Gore had been elected president, right now he would just be finding that last lesbian quadriplegic for the Special Forces team.

I don't know if [former U.S. President Bill Clinton is] gay. But [former U.S. Vice President] Al Gore - total fag.

Because they speak French.

Why is this thus? What is the reason of this thusness?

I now bid you a welcome adoo.

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes!

Preserving the sweetness of proportion and expressing itself beyond expression.

Ahern has had his speaking style described as 'Bertispeak 'It is not correct, and if I said so, I was not correct -- I cannot recall if I said it, but I did not say, or if I did, I did not mean to say it -- ' [6]

Finns can be silent in several languages.

The number of syllables in the English names of finite integers tends to increase as the integers grow larger, and must gradually increase indefinitely, since only a finite number of names can be made with a given finite number of syllables. Hence the names of some integers must consist of at least nineteen syllables, and among these there must be a least. Hence 'the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables' must denote a definite integer; in fact, it denotes 111, 777. But 'the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables' is itself a name consisting of eighteen syllables; hence the least integer not nameable in fewer than nineteen syllables can be named in eighteen syllables, which is a contradiction. This contradiction was suggested to us by Mr. G. G. Berry of the Bodleian Library.

When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.

Shalom haver. Goodbye friend.

They are subhuman. They are the scum of the Earth. When you talk about Jews, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel of humanity.

Words: 'Words are the tools that verbally enable our thoughts. If a person cannot communicate his ideas effectively to others because of a weakness in language, then how may he understand the concepts of others fully? Moreover, how may one conceive and understand one's own creative thoughts? How can you bring to fruition that which you cannot convert from the abstract?'

Deception: 'Truth is often the favorite tool of those who deceive.'

Language: 'Language is vastly important to nearly all human progression. Language is a factor that joins nations of people together. It is a common denominator among civilizations of people where in some cases there may be few others but hate. Though through language there may be division, without its powers there would be only division. If a person cannot communicate his ideas effectively to others because of a weakness in language, then how may they understand the concepts of others fully? And even more important, how may one conceive and understand one's own creative thoughts? How can you bring to fruition that which you cannot convert from the abstract?'

La jeune fille, ce qu'elle est en realite. Une petite sotte et une petite salope; la plus grande imbecile unie a la plus grande depravation.

Il y a dans le mot, dans le verbe , quelque chose de sacre qui nous defend d'en faire un jeu de hasard. Manier savamment une langue, c'est pratiquer une espece de sorcellerie evocatoire.

La difficulte d'ecrire l'anglais m'est extremement ennuyeuse. Ah, mon Dieu ! si l'on pouvait toujours ecrire cette belle langue de France!

To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant, but requires a time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted in another, or that all thought is in signs.

I have really early memories of life, so don't freak out. As a child I'd get caught up in how words didn't make any sense. I remember hearing the song 'She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain When She Comes,' trying to figure out what the fuck the guy was talking about.

It's hard to defend 'I've got hoes in different area codes'. It's hard to defend 'move, bitch, get out the way'! : Well, as you can see, there's a bitch in his way, that he needs to move. Thus the term, 'move, bitch, get out the way'. You need to open your eyes so you can get the bitches out of your way!

When I heard they were trying and get rid of the word 'nigger', I told my accountant to buy 800 shares of 'coon'.

It is not enough to 'have' free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries.

That phrase, 'loss of innocence,' has become stale with overuse and diminishing returns; no other culture is so addicted to this narcissistic impression of itself as having any innocence to lose in the first place.

I'm very glad that there was, in fact, a consequence. I think that this kind of coarse language doesn't belong anywhere in reasonable dialogue between reasonable people. ... It gets ruined by this disgusting -- and I'll use the word 'disgusting' -- comment which doesn't belong in any polite company and certainly doesn't belong on any radio station that I would listen to.

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.

I signaled to my host to try to have the philosophers expound on some aspect of their knowledge. As a good friend he immediately rose to the occasion. I won't go into the conversation that accompanied his request, and the difference between the comic and the serious was too slight to translate.

Cyn rheitied i mi brydu Ag i tithau bregethu, A chyn iawned ym glera Ag I tithau gardota. Pand englynion ac odlau Yw'r hymnau a'r segwensiau? A chywyddau i Dduw lwyd Yw sallwyr Dafydd Broffwyd.

Harddwas teg a'm anrhegai, Hylaw wr mawr hael yw'r Mai. Anfones ym iawn fwnai, Glas defyll glan mwyngyll Mai. Ffloringod brig ni'm digiai, Fflwr-dy-lis gyfoeth mis Mai.

Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning. A society whose intellectual leaders lose the skill to shape, appreciate, and understand the power of language will become the slaves of those who retain it - be they politicians, preachers, copywriters, or newscasters.

The best way to learn Japanese is to be born as a Japanese baby, in Japan, raised by a Japanese family.

I'll be back ya black motherfucker. Wide nose havin' motherfuckers! They shoulda never gave you niggas money! You don't appreciate shit! You know you can get another couch. What am I gonna do about my legs Eddie Murphy!?

'It's great to be alone for a minute in the confession room (laughs)...NIGGAZ IS WILIN'!'

I didn't know you liked to get wet.