Quotes on English Language

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!

A different language is a different vision of life.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

My favorite three words in the English language are: ’I don’t know’, because every time I say them, I learn something new.

The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

They had nothing in common but the English language.

Two of the saddest words in the English language are, 'What party?' And LA is the 'What party?' capital of the world.

If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

I do not know if there is a more dreadful word in the English language than that word "lost."

A man of true science... thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

The English language has a deceptive air of simplicity; so have some little frocks; but they are both not the kind of thing you can run up in half an hour with a machine.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.