“Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a wo...”

“The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguis...”

“Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.”

“English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin...”

“Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disas...”

“Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like. ”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”

“Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.”

“Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get th...”

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”