Usage Quotes

• English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

  E. B. White

  Communication, Luck, Taste And Judgment

  E. B. WHITE (1954). “The SECOND TREE from the CORNER”

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• Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

  Douglas Adams

  Safe, Strange, Awareness

  Douglas Adams (2009). “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”, p.35, Pan Macmillan

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• Look at growth, look at how much time people spend on the Net and look at the variety of things that they are doing. It's all really good, so I am actually encouraged by the fundamentals that underlie usage growth on the Net.

  Meg Whitman

  Business, Technology, People

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• What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Long, People, Host

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• When the satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as significant to one as one's own satisfaction or security, then the state of love exists. Under no other circumstances is a state of love present, regardless of the popular usage of the term.

  Harry Stack Sullivan

  Love, Satisfaction, Becoming

  Harry Stack Sullivan (1940). “Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry: The First William Alanson White Memorial Lectures”

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• Usage is the best language teacher.

  Quintilian

  Teacher, Language

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• The inspired scribbler always has the gift for gossip in our common usage he or she can always inspire the commonplace with an uncommon flavor, and transform trivialities by some original grace or sympathy or humor or affection.

  Elizabeth Drew

  Sympathy, Gossip, Grace

  Elizabeth Drew (1964). “The Literature of Gossip”

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• Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.

  Bram Cohen

  Thinking, Technology, Drug Use

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• While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there--patriarchal control of animals and of language.

  Carol J. Adams

  Distance, Reality, Animal

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• I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.

  Roland Barthes

  Passion, Mean, Thinking

  Mythologies "La Nouvelle Citroen" (1957) (translation by Annette Lavers)

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• Put God in your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the payment is with-held, the better for you; for compound interest on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Debt, Payment, Interest

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1911). “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR SELF-RELIANCE COMPENSATION”

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• It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

  A. E. van Vogt

  Break Up, Breakup, Interesting

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• If man did not exist as a world-spanning receptive realm of perception, if he were not engaged in this capacity, nothing at all could exist. 'Being,' in its traditional usage, means 'presence' and 'persistence.' To achieve presence, and thereby being, an entity requires some sort of open realm in which presence and persistence can take place. Thus an open realm of perception like that of human existence is the one being that makes being possible.

  Medard Boss

  Mean, Persistence, Men

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• My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

  David Bohm

  Order, Feelings, Mind

  "Wholeness and the Implicate Order". Book by David Bohm, 1980.

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• We understand the need to balance our short- and longer-term needs because our revenue is the engine that funds all our innovation. But over time, our emerging high-usage products will likely generate significant new revenue streams for Google as well as for our partners, just as search does today.

  Larry Page

  Google, Innovation, Balance

  "Larry Page Just Put Out A Big Manifesto - Read The Full Thing Here" by Matt Lynley, www.businessinsider.com. April 5, 2012.

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• I reject the word 'script' entirely-at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage-usually scenario-which it had in the Commedia dell'Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.

  Jacques Rivette

  Ideas, Numbers, Scripts

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• Again, like I said, we're not trying to censor anyone. If you think drugs are cool, fine. Make that movie. We are not going to stop you, or try to stop you, but we would encourage other people to be a bit more responsible about their portrayal of drug usage.

  Gerald McRaney

  Thinking, People, Drug

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• Those who are seeking ways to tap into the potential of e-mail will find themselves in a position to capitalize on the pending explosion in Internet usage.

  Alexander Haig

  Mail, Way, Internet

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• Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.

  Nathan Myhrvold

  Strong, Use, Rationale

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• People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

  Steven Pinker

  Track, People, Doe

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• It is important that the United States move with all deliberate speed to develop and get into usage alternative fuels that will allow us to end our dependence on foreign oil.

  Virgil Goode

  Moving, Oil, Important

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• Usage is like oxygen for ideas. That means every moment you're working on something without it being in the public it's actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world.

  Matt Mullenweg

  Real, Mean, Oxygen

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• Elasticsearch is all about scale for us. At Foursquare, we handle tens of millions of searches across 50 million locations each day. Elasticsearch returns real-time results, which encourages more usage and deeper engagement.

  Andrew Hogue

  Real, Return, Engagement

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• To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go. The tales of rough usage are for the most part exaggerations, as also are the tales of sea danger. To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over.

  Joshua Slocum

  Men, Light, Sea

  Joshua Slocum (1985). “The Voyages of Joshua Slocum”, p.381, Sheridan House, Inc.

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• One of the problems with sex education... is that it also strips kids - especially girls - of their modesty to have every detail of anatomy, physiology and condom usage made explicit.

  James Dobson

  Girl, Sex, Kids

  "Focus on the Family with Dr. James C. Dobson" by James C. Dobson, volumes 19-20, 1995.

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