872 quotes found
“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
“A schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go fo...”
“Language is a piss poor attempt at telepathy is what it is. We try to put our thoughts into each other's heads through language...But half the intended meaning gets lost in the transmission, and th...”
“please don't cook me, kind sirs! I am a good cook myself, and cook better than I cook, if you see what I mean.”
“As vocabulary is reduced , so are the number of feelings you can express, the number of events you can describe, the number of the things you can identify! Not only understanding is limited, but al...”
“ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translat...”
“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.”
“Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.”
“She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be lik...”
“English is a beautiful language, a remarkably precise language with a million words to choose from to deliver your exact shade of meaning.”
“Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me.”
“It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would...”
“I am firmly of the opinion that people who cant speak have nothing to say. Its one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues allow them a language as lousy as their life”
“A body is a body, but only voices are capable of love”
“The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect”
“There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.”
“When you have a strongly held belief, don't you think it's important to express that belief accurately?”
“My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would ...”
“There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of soci...”
“Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only ar...”
