2. If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. Ludwig Wittgenstein

3. Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. Benjamin Whorf

4. One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland -- and no other. E.M. Cioran

5. I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand. Sir Edward Appleton

6. 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. Roland Barthes

7. Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier. Louise Bogan

8. There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth. Elias Canetti

9. Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation. Noam Chomsky

10. It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion. Rene Daumal

11. The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay. E.B. White

12. A mind enclosed in language is in prison. Simone Weil

13. Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. Lily Tomlin

14. Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence. George Steiner

15. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. Ferdinand De Sausurre

16. Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. George Orwell

17. There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything! Maria Montessori

18. An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates. Thomas Mann

19. No literature is complete until the language it was written in is dead. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

20. Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing. Claude Levi Strauss

21. The eyes have one language everywhere. George Herbert

22. Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own. Wolfgang Johann Goethe

23. Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. Ralph Waldo Emerson

24. There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it? Barbara Ehrenreich

25. A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. Gaston Bachelard

26. 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. Italo Calvino

27. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot. Joseph Conrad

28. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it. Benjamin Whorf

29. The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott

30. Man, even man debased by the neocapitalism and pseudo socialism of our time, is a marvelous being because he sometimes speaks. Language is the mark, the sign, not of his fall but of his original innocence. Through the Word we may regain the lost kingdom and recover powers we possessed in the far-distant past. Octavio Paz

31. To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up. George Orwell

32. 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. Paul De Man

33. Language is an archeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history. Russell Hoban

34. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. Thomas Hardy

35. Drawing on my fine command of the language, I said nothing. Robert Benchley

36. To have another language is to possess a second soul. Charlemagne

37. Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking. Sir Humphrey Davey

38. There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! Samuel Clements

39. I wish life was not so short, he thought. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about. J.R. Tolkein

40. A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression. Ezra Pound

41. Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas. Samuel Johnson

42. I speak two languages. Body and English Mae West

43. Syllables govern the world. John Seldon

44. There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture. William Shakespeare

45. It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. Carl Sagan

46. 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. Aldous Huxley

47. Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms. Penelope Lively

48. For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it. Ambrose Bierce

49. Language is a mixture of statement and evocation. Elizabeth Bowen

50. We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted. H.R. Halderman

51. in every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jing by gee by gosh by gum e.e. cummings

52. And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection. Irving Layton

53. Language is energy made visible. D. Deubelbeiss

54. If language hadn ’ t been possible, we ’ d of found another way. Nature is of necessity and knows no nos. D. Deubelbeiss

55. Babble is one way communication. A closed bubble. D. Deubelbeiss

56. In the beginning was “ The Word ”. Nobody knew what it meant so we decided to talk about it. D. Deubelbeiss

57. Language is as much what is left out as what is left in. And in that way it is right. D. Deubelbeiss

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