Famous Quotes about Language (122 Quotations)

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

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

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

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.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

If English is spoken in heaven. God undoubtedly employs Cranmer as his speechwriter. The angels of the lesser ministries probably use the language of the New English Bible and the Alternative Service Book for internal memos.

If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin they would never have found time to conquer the world.

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

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

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.

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

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.

It was Greek to me.

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

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.

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