Lexicon Quotes

• Clever people are always the best conversations lexicon.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Clever, Intelligent, People

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• I've been 6'4'' since I was 12. Goofy is somewhere in the lexicon.

  Jason Segel

  Goofy

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• Immigration, a lexicon. You're a 'migrant' when you're very poor; 'immigrant' when you're not so poor; and 'expat' when you're rich.

  Laila Lalami

  Migrants, Immigration, Rich

  Twitter post from Apr 8, 2013

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• The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Reading, Different, May

  J M Coetzee (2015). “Diary of a Bad Year”, p.23, Random House

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• A word into the silence thrown always finds its echo somewhere where silence opens hidden lexicons.

  Dejan Stojanovic

  Echoes, Silence, Thrown

  "Emily Dickinson". Poem by Dejan Stojanovic,

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• In the lexicon of the political class, the word 'sacrifice' means that the citizens are supposed to mail even more of their income to Washington so that the political class will not have to sacrifice the pleasure of spending it.

  George Will

  Mean, Sacrifice, Class

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• In the lexicon of youth which fate reserves for a bright manhood, there is no such word as fail.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Failure, Fate, Youth

  Richelieu act 2, sc. 2 (1839)

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• Every single aspect of a text requires very careful choices and rigorous evaluation. Style is employed - or deployed - for a reason. It's purposeful. Form and aesthetics are part of meaning-making. Ideally, a writer would have mastery over a wide variety of rhetorical gestures and tonalities, our lexicon and punctuation system, our grammar, and all the riches of a liberal and literary education.

  C.E. Morgan

  Choices, Style, Mastery

  Source: www.commonwealmagazine.org

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• Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

  Clark Gable

  Movie, Badass, Wind

  "Fictional character: Rhett Butler". "Gone with the Wind", 1939.

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• You can't handle the truth!

  Jack Nicholson

  Movie, Memorable, Great Year

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• Stars ink your fingers
  with a lexicon of flame
  blazing rare knowledge.

  Aberjhani

  Stars, Flames, Ink

  Aberjhani (2010). “The River of Winged Dreams”, p.67, Lulu.com

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• Psychobabble is... a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.

  Richard Rosen

  Understanding, Frozen, Jargon

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• Silks, velvets, calicoes, and the whole lexicon of female fopperies.

  Jonathan Swift

  Fashion, Female, Velvet

  Jonathan Swift (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Jonathan Swift (Illustrated)”, p.1604, Delphi Classics

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• In the American political lexicon, 'change' always means more of the same: more government, more looting of Americans, more inflation, more police-state measures, more unnecessary war, and more centralization of power.

  Ron Paul

  War, Mean, Government

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• Goethe said, "The author whom a lexicon can keep up with is worth nothing"; Somerset Maugham says that the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his readers said: "I read your novel without having to look up a single word in the dictionary." These writers, plainly, lived in different worlds.

  Randall Jarrell

  Different, Looks, World

  "No Other Book: Selected Essays". Book by Randall Jarrell. Chapter: "The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 13, 1999.

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• A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer tolerates the opposition of activity and passivity, nor that of cause and effect, or of indetermination and determination, etc., such that in designating consciousness as an effect or a determination, one continues - for strategic reasons that can be more or less lucidly deliberated and systematically calculated - to operate according to the lexicon of that which one is de-limiting.

  Jacques Derrida

  Determination, Etc, Causes

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• Some people simply use their faith as a lexicon of behavioral reasoning; without that they would be forced to face their own moral and ethical failings honestly according to a secular code of right and wrong.

  Deborah Feldman

  People, Would Be, Use

  Deborah Feldman (2014). “Exodus: A Memoir”, p.75, Penguin

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• Every scientist should remove the word 'impossible' from their lexicon.

  Christopher Reeve

  Impossible, Scientist, Should

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• The general advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure, because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity, which really means 'originality': The most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising

  David Ogilvy

  Mean, Creativity, Agency

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• With all of its false assumptions and evil methods, communism grew as a protest against the hardships of the underprivileged. Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Wisdom, Practice, Class

  Martin Luther King (Jr.) (1964). “A Martin Luther King Treasury”

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• I can't say that I know the lexicon as intimately as a lot of people, so I may be unworthy of being called a Trekkie. That would be doing a disservice to the people who really are Trekkies.

  Alice Eve

  People, Would Be, May

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• Your lexicon is not entitled to slurs; it's time to retire them.

  Tim McIlrath

  Retiring, Entitled, Slurs

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• What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'

  Joel Salatin

  Wall, Latin, Years

  "Interview: Joel Salatin" by Gaby Wood, www.theguardian.com. January 30, 2010.

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• Liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, which means pertaining to a free man. In politics, to be liberal is to want to extend democracy through change and reform. One can see why that word had to be erased from our political lexicon.

  Gore Vidal

  Latin, Mean, Men

  Gore Vidal (1992). “The Decline and Fall of the American Empire”

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• [I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Girl, Vocabulary, Class

  Andrea Dworkin (1989). “Pornography: men possessing women”, Plume

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