Quotes on Language

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

We are at a time in our country's history that inclusive language is better than exclusive language.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

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.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial.

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.

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.