A few quotes about Language
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We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Abigail Adams

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.
Aeschylus

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.
Marcellinus Ammianus

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Anonymous

The kindest word in all the world is the unkind word, unsaid.
Anonymous

Kindness: a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Anonymous

The easiest way to save face is to keep the lower half shut.
Anonymous

Foolishness always results when the tongue outraces the brain.
Anonymous

Never miss a good chance to shut up.
Anonymous

The words you choose to say something are just as important as the decision to speak.
Anonymous

I just wish my mouth had a backspace key.
Anonymous

The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't being said.
Anonymous

Keep your words soft and tender because tomorrow you may have to eat them.
Anonymous

Talk is cheap because supply exceeds demand.
Anonymous

Never argue with a fool. Someone watching may not be able to tell the difference.
Anonymous

When you're arguing with a fool, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.
Anonymous

The only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the tongue.
Anonymous

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.
Anonymous

Even a fish wouldn't get into trouble if he kept his mouth shut.
Anonymous

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.
Sir Edward Appleton

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
Aprocrypha

High thoughts must have high language.
Aristophanes

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud

It's not what you tell them…it's what they hear.
Red Auerbach

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

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
Walter Bagehot

If everybody thought before they spoke, the silence would be deafening.
George Barzan

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.
Aubrey Beardsley

Drawing on my find command of language, I said nothing.
Robert Charles Benchley

For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change.
Ingrid Bengis

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
Eric Bentley

Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.
Isaiah Berlin

Heaven, n.: A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.
Ambrose Bierce

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
Josh Billings

Language is the biggest barrier to human progress because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old fashioned way.
Edward de Bono

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.
Pearl S. Buck

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
Robert Burchfield

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.
Orson Rega Card

There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it."
Dale Carnegie

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.
Raymond Chandler

To have another language is to possess a second soul.
Charlemagne

One of the basic causes for all the trouble in the world today is that people talk too much and think too little. They act impulsively without thinking. I always try to think before I talk.
Margaret Chase Smith

Not the fastest horse can catch a word spoken in anger.
Chinese Proverb

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Noam Chomsky

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Sir Winston Churchill

By swallowing evil words unsaid, no one has ever harmed his stomach.
Winston Churchill

Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room.
Winston Churchill

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.
Winston Churchill

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad

I have noticed that nothing I have never said ever did me any harm.
Calvin Coolidge

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.
Quentin Crisp

If you describe things as better than they are, you are thought a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you are thought a realist; if you describe things as exactly as they are, then you are thought a satirist.
Quentin Crisp

Two monologues do not make a dialogue.
Jeff Daly

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?
Samuel Daniel

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?
Clarence Darrow

The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.
Henri Delacroix

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication.... Try the experiment of communicating, with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another, especially if it be somewhat complicated, and you will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.
John Dewey

Talk to people about themselves and they will listen for hours.
Benjamin Disraeli

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Will Durant

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.
Andrea Dworkin

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.
Albert Einstein

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
George Eliot

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings - much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving evidence of the fact.
George Eliot

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Use soft words and hard arguments.
English Proverb

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
Epictetus

Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach

The language of truth is simple.
Euripides

I tell you everything that is really nothing, and nothing of what is everything, do not be fooled by what I am saying. Please listen carefully and try to hear what I am not saying.
Charles C. Finn

Deeds, not words shall speak me.
John Fletcher

Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.
John French

Writing is a struggle against silence.
Carlos Fuentes

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.
Mahatma Gandhi

Be careful of your thoughts; they may become words at any moment.
Ira Gassen

We live at the level of our language. Whatever we can articulate we can imagine or explore. All you have to do to educate a child is leave them alone and teach them to read. The rest is brainwashing.
Ellen Gilcrist

The older I grow the more I listen to people who don't talk much.
Germain G. Glien

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When someone does something good, applaud! You'll make two people happy.
Sam Goldwyn

Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body
Martha Graham

Don't tell your friends about your indigestion. "How are you" is a greeting, not a question.
Arthur Guiterman

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.
Ursula K. Le Guin

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway

Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.
Hermann Hesse

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
Douglas Hofstadter

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!
Barbara Holland

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hands on the strings to stop their vibration as in twanging them to bring out their music.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Horace

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while.
Kin Hubbard

The only way to entertain some folks is to listen to them.
Kin Hubbard

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.
Rosenstock Huessy

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Aldous Huxley

To speak and to speak well are two things. A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks.
Ben Jonson

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.
Samuel Johnson

Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
Wendell Johnson

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assualts on the unthinking.
John Maynard Keynes

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.
Thomas S. Kuhn

The trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you haven't thought of yet.
Ann Landers

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.
Doug Larson

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
Doug Larson

A spoonful of humor makes the message go down easier.
Frank Leahy

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.
Claude Levi-Strauss

It is better to keep one's mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Language is the inventory of human experience.
L. W. Lockhart

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.
David Lodge

The fewer words the better prayer.
Martin Luther

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs.
Jack Lynch

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