If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the critical role of language and writing in preserving humanity and civilization.
Robert Bringhurst's quote highlights the importance of language and writing as fundamental to human civilization. It suggests that while the loss of language might signify a profound loss for humanity itself, the loss of writing would only affect certain forms of society and culture, implying that alternative societies could still thrive without it. This perspective invites reflection on the resilience of human experience and the varied forms civilization can take, even in the face of loss.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of preserving indigenous languages.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.
Typography exists to honor content.
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?
Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.
We may now have reached a point where this gap in our make-up has become unsustainable; partly because what in the past would have counted as material plenty has become the norm for the majority in much of the world; and partly because the slow retreat of religion that coincided with the spread of a capitalist economy has left a gaping hole in millions of people's lives. (Geoff Mulgan)
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?
That democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something so utterly different that few of those who wish it would be prepared to accept the consequences, many will not believe until the connection has been laid bare in all its aspects.
The quality of mercy is not strained
Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
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