Language Quotes - Page 31

• Saddam Hussein also challenged President Bush to a debate. The Butcher of Baghdad vs. the Butcher of the English language.

  Jay Leno

  President, Hussein, Baghdad

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• I admit that these terms and the diagrams connected with them repel some readers, and fill others with the vain imagination that they have mastered difficult economics problems, when really they have done little more than learn the language in which parts of those problems can be expressed, and the machinery by which they can be handled. When the actual conditions of particular problems have not been studied, such knowledge is little better than a derrick for sinking oil-wells erected where there are no oil-bearing strata.

  Alfred Marshall

  Oil, Imagination, Done

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• Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Communication, Next, Endure

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred R. Ferguson (1965). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume V: 1835-1838”, p.334, Harvard University Press

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• Through radio I look forward to a United States of the World. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence. (1926)

  Arthur E. Kennelly

  Science, Important, United States

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• If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all the nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.

  Frederick Douglass

  Eagles, Civilization, Wings

  "Our Composite Nationality". Frederick Douglass' Address in Boston, Massachusetts, teachingamericanhistory.org. December 7, 1869.

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• Many expressions that are in common usage, and sometimes the structure of language itself, reveal the fact that people don't know who they are. You say: "He lost his life" or "my life," as if life were something that you can possess or lose. The truth is: you don't have a life, you are life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. Can you sense deep within that you already know that? Can you sense that you already are That?

  Eckhart Tolle

  Stars, Animal, Expression

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “Stillness Speaks”, p.53, New World Library

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• To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

  George Eliot

  Inspirational, Knowing

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• To learn a new language is, therefore, always a sort of spiritual adventure; it is like a journey of discovery in which we find a new world.

  Ernst Cassirer

  Spiritual, Adventure, Journey

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• Lenin could listen so intently that he exhausted the speaker.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Communication, Exhausted, Speakers

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• No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

  Aubrey Beardsley

  Communication, Rude, Polite

  Aubrey Beardsley (1921). “Under the Hill: And Other Essays in Prose and Verse”

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• There seems to be an increasing awareness of something we Americans have known for some time - that the ten most dangerous words in the English language are "Hi, I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Helping, Awareness

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1991). “Ronald Reagan”

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• The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

  Robert Burchfield

  Communication, Editors, Monsters

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• The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood.

  Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

  Philosophy, Cutting, Science

  Presidential Address to Classical Association, 1959.

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• The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."

  Ronald Reagan

  Government, Nine, Helping

  United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), Ronald Reagan (1982). “Ronald Reagan”

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• There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

  Barbara Holland

  Communication, Needs, Painful

  Barbara Holland (2010). “Secrets of the Cat: Its Lore, Legend, and Lives”, p.25, Harper Collins

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• Whenever two good people argue over principles, they are both right.

  Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

  Communication, Two, People

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• We are not voting for health care if we do not resolve this language on public funding for abortion - no public funding for abortion.

  Bart Stupak

  Voting, Abortion, Care

  "Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak: Health Care Hero or Villain?". On the Record" with Greta Van Susteren, www.foxnews.com. March 05, 2010.

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• Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

  Benjamin Lee Whorf

  Writing, Defining, Framework

  'Thinking in Primitive Communities' in Hoyer (ed.) 'New Directions in the Study of Language' 1964

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• We find that one of the most rewarding features of being scientists these days ... is the common bond which the search for truth provides to scholars of many tongues and many heritages. In the long run, that spirit will inevitably have a constructive effect on the benefits which man can derive from knowledge of himself and his environment.

  Stanford Moore

  Running, Knowledge, Science

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• The four sweetest words in the English language — 'You wore me down.'

  Aziz Ansari

  Four, English Language, Sweetest

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

  Joseph Joubert

  Writing, Glasses, Fine Words

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

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Inspiration, Learning, Knowing

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2012). “The Goethe Treasury: Selected Prose and Poetry”, p.293, Courier Corporation

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

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Worst, Translations

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• The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

  Steven Pinker

  Baby, Age, Tourists

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• A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.

  Gregory Rabassa

  Quality, Equal, Accuracy

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