Language

"Philology, especially in Germany, no longer partakes of the larger perspectives on scholarly inquiry as a whole."

"I hope I have shown that the fictitious unities of race and nation whipped up by philologists, anthropologists, historians, and social scientists of the nineteenth century as alternatives to the antique political state led them to forget a very important past and to invent in its place novel forms of governance that were pursued with vengeance and arrogance and all the cunning skill of the fore-thinkers."

"As poacher turned gamekeeper, C.S. Lewis found himself having to drill students in the elements of Old English philology."

"Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities—those that grew up in Germany in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Philology inspired the most advanced humanistic studies in the United States and the United Kingdom in the decades before 1850 and sent its generative currents through the intellectual life of Europe and America. It meant far more than the study of old texts. Philology referred to all studies of language, of specific languages, and (to be sure) of texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians—and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself."

"A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style."

"The influence of German and European philology may be seen in the genealogical lines of early American Sanskrit which crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic: Edward Salisbury studied with Bopp in Berlin, Lassen in Bonn and de Sacy and Burnouf in Paris; Salisbury's student Whitney trained with Bopp and Weber in Berlin, and Roth in Tübingen; Whitney's student Lanman in Tübingen, Berlin and Leipzig."

"Philologists, who chase A panting syllable through time and space, Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark."

"Philology always leads to crime."

"Among us, the so-called "higher criticism," which reigns supreme in the domain of philology has also taken possession of our historical literature. This higher criticism has been the pretext for introducing all the anti-historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest. Here we have the other method of making the past a living reality; putting subjective fancies in the place of historical data; fancies whose merit is measured by their boldness, that is, the scantiness of the particulars on which they are based, and the peremptoriness with which they contravene the best established facts of history."

"For the new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race. . . . There seems to me no doubt that modern philology has suggested a grouping of peoples quite unlike anything that had been thought of before. If you examine the bases proposed for common nationality before the new knowledge growing out of the study of Sanscrit had been popularised in Europe, you will find them extremely unlike those which are now advocated and even passionately advocated in parts of the Continent. . . . That peoples not necessarily understanding one another's tongue should be grouped together politically on the ground of linguistic affinities assumed to prove community of descent, is quite a new idea."

"Philologists appear to me to be a secret society who wish to train our youth by means of the culture of antiquity · I could well understand this society and their views being criticised from all sides. A great deal would depend upon knowing what these philologists understood by the term "culture of antiquity"—If I saw, for example, that they were training their pupils against German philosophy and German music, I should either set about combating them or combating the culture of antiquity, perhaps the former, by showing that these philologists had not understood the culture of antiquity."

"To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology."

"Now the philosophy of life, in its highest range at least, is a divine science of experience. This experience, however, is throughout internal and spiritual. It is therefore easily conceivable that it can enter readily and easily into all other experimental sciences, and into those especially which more immediately relate to man, as, for instance, most of the branches of natural history, and still more into philology, with which at present we are most immediately concerned. And this it does, in order to borrow such illustrations and comparisons as may tend to elucidate or further to develop its own subject-matter, or else to furnish applications to individual cases in other departments of life. However, in thus proceeding, philosophy must take heed lest it overpass its own proper limits or forget its true end and aim. It must not go too deeply into particulars, or lose itself among the specialities of the other sciences. On the contrary, it ought carefully to confine itself to those points which more immediately concern man, and especially the inner man, and, adhering to the meaning and spirit of the whole, seek to elucidate and throw out this pre-eminently."

"BALD heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?"

"Able was I ere I saw Elba."

"Madam, I'm Adam."

"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!"

"A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal – Panama"

"Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel (Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel)"

"No one made killer apparel like Dame Noon."

"Si Nummi immunis."

"Sator arepo tenet opera rotas."

"In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni."

"Spelling is the art of writing words with their proper letters. In the English language this art is peculiarly difficult."

"Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural."

"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend."

"Spelling checkers (sometimes called "spell checkers" by people who need syntax checkers) ..."

"My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."

"With the aid of my all-important spelling correction program, I can be confident of my presentation. Do I fear that I will lose my ability to spell as a result of overreliance on this technological crutch? What ability? Actually, my spelling is improving through the use of this spelling corrector that continually points out my errors and suggests corrections."

"As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting."

"They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce."

"This method, seemingly very clever, actually played into our hands! And so it often happens that an apparently ingenious idea is in fact a weakness which the scientific cryptographer seizes on for his solution."

"Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break."

"The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write."

"The magic words are squeamish ossifrage"

"Feistel and Coppersmith rule. Sixteen rounds and one hell of an avalanche."

"For the computer security community, the moral is obvious: if you are designing a system whose functions include providing evidence, it had better be able to withstand hostile review."

"When a cryptanalyst starts out trying to analyze a new algorithm, his first thought is probably: "Yikes. What a mess. I'll never make sense of this". So there are all sorts of tricks to help you start to probe into the convoluted innards of the cipher. One of these is to attack a weakened version. Later, he may be able to extend the attack to the full strength version; or, if this cannot be done, the reason why it can't at least gives some insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the cipher."

"There is also a side benefit: the difference in strength made by even really subtle changes warns us just how tricky crypto can be..."

"Due to the suspicious nature of crypto users I have a feeling DES will be with us forever, we will just keep adding keys and cycles..."

"The NSA response was, "Well, that was interesting, but there aren't any ciphers like that.""

"The real work in an attack, at least an attack against a well-designed cipher, is modifying the attack technique so that it works. Knudsen's papers are an excellent example of this; he is a master at making an attack work where others have failed. Differentials work where characteristics don't. Truncated differentials work where normal differentials don't. Even this year's exciting find, impossible differentials, are simply another way at looking at a differential attack. A cryptanalyst with a "menu" would have never found any of those attacks, and would have broken far fewer ciphers."

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

"The point of academic attacks is not exhibiting practical breaks; the point is that only a trained cryptographer can tell whether a given algorithm is secure or not. The author of an algorithm says: "My cipher is secure, and trust me, I am an expert at this. And to prove that I am a real good expert, I challenge other experts to find even the most impractical, academic flaw in my cipher"."

"Just like glue. Commercial ads state that the foobar glue can stick an elephant to the ceiling. Who needs to stick an elephant to the ceiling? But if it can do that, people will trust its sticking strength."

"We didn't do this with just a pencil and some paper. Lots of our notes are in pen. We didn't need to erase much."

"If you think cryptography is the answer to your problem, then you don't know what your problem is."

"We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. To you symbols are just words, spoken or written in a book. To us they are part of nature, part of ourselves, even little insects like ants and grasshoppers. We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart, and we need no more than a hint to give us the meaning."

"In a sense, the American Indian perceives all that exists as symbolic. This outlook has given currency to the concept of the Indian as one who is close to the earth, but the closeness is actual, not a quaint result of savagism or childlike naiveté. An Indian, at the deepest level of being, assumes that the earth is alive in the same sense that human beings are alive. This aliveness is seen in nonphysical terms, in terms that are perhaps familiar to the mystic or the psychic, and this view gives rise to a metaphysical sense of reality that is an ineradicable part of Indian awareness. In brief, we can say that the sun or the earth or a tree is a symbol of an extraordinary truth."

"Symbols in American Indian systems are not symbolic in the usual sense of the word. The words articulate reality—not “psychological” or imagined reality, not emotive reality captured metaphorically in an attempt to fuse thought and feeling, but that reality where thought and feeling are one, where objective and subjective are one, where speaker and listener are one, where sound and sense are one."

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or s."

"[S]ymbols have a reach and a roundness that goes beyond their literal and practical meaning. They are the rich concepts under which the mind gathers many particulars into one name, and many instances into one general induction."

"King Arthur had a dream, too. Of a world where might served right, instead of subjugating it. His knights of the Round Table were the agents of that dream … and his sword, Excalibur, the Symbol of it. He died, the table was destroyed, his knights mostly slain — yet the dream survived. They became legend — and the sword, the means of keeping the legend alive and vital through the ages. … The sword Excalibur, represented Hope. It was light in the darkness of fear and ignorance and hate. Do we want — have we the right — to snuff it out?"

"We are symbols, and inhabit symbols."

"We often dismiss controversies or concerns by waving our hands and saying something like, “Oh, that’s merely symbolic,” as if the meaning we give to symbols is somehow irrelevant compared with more tangible things. But symbolism — the way we reduce broad concerns, agendas, and visions to images or rituals — has played a defining role in human life since there have been humans. Try burning a flag or a cross in front of the wrong audience and then tell me symbolism is nothing."

"I think, here is your emblem To hang in the future sky; Not the cross, not the hive, But this; bright power, dark peace; Fierce consciousness joined with final Disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon’s Realist eyes and act Married to the massive Mysticism of stone, Which failure cannot cast down Nor success make proud."

"Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide. The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel, formerly used to kill men, but here In the sense of a symbol."

"Science and mathematics Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it, They never touch it: consider what an explosion Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world If any mind for a moment touch truth."

"In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex)."

"All religious expression is symbolism; since we can describe only what we see, and the true objects of religion are The Seen. The earliest instruments of education were symbols; and they and all other religious forms differed and still differ according to external circumstances and imagery, and according to differences of knowledge and mental cultivation. All language is symbolic, so far as it is applied to mental and spiritual phenomena and action. All words have, primarily, a material sense, howsoever they may afterward get, for the ignorant, a spiritual non-sense. To "retract," for example, is to draw back, and when applied to a statement, is symbolic, as much so as a picture of an arm drawn back, to express the same thing, would he. The very word "spirit" means " breath," from the Latin verb spiro, breathe."

"It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge."

"Promethea: Don't worry, some symbols always means the same thing...and the archetype of wisdom is eternal."

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."

"Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it."

"In a book called Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Whitehead points out that perception is usually a matter of symbols, just like language; I say I see a book when I actually see a red oblong. The Transactionists (who have been influenced by Whitehead rather than Husserl) take this one stage further, and point out that when I 'perceive' something, I am actually making a bet with myself that what I perceive is what I think it is. In order to act and live at all, I have to make these bets; I cannot afford to make absolutely certain that things are what I think they are. But this means that we should not take our perceptions at face value, any more than Nietzsche was willing to take philosophy at its face value; we must allow for prejudice and distortion."

"With crosses, relics, crucifixes, Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pixes; The tools of working out salvation By mere mechanic operation."

"Science sees signs; Poetry the thing signified."

"It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested."

"All things are symbols: the external shows Of Nature have their image in the mind, As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves."

"Sometime we see a cloud that's dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendant rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon 't, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs; They are black vesper's pageants."

"If he be not in love with some woman, there is no believing old signs: a' brushes his hat o' mornings; what should that bode?"

"Each language is the sign and power of the soul of the people which naturally speaks it. Each develops therefore its own peculiar spirit, thought-temperament, way of dealing with life and knowledge and experience.... A nation, race or people which loses its language, cannot live its whole life or its real life. And this advantage to the national life is at the same time an advantage to the general life of the human race."

"Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God; and began to build a tower in Sennaar, which afterwards was called Babel (that is, 'confusion'). By this means human beings hoped to climb up to heaven, intending in their foolishness not to equal but to excel their creator. ... Only among those who were engaged in a particular activity did their language remain unchanged; so, for in­stance, there was one for all the architects, one for all the carriers of stones, one for all the stone-breakers, and so on for all the different opera­tions. As many as were the types of work involved in the enterprise, so many were the languages by which the human race was fragmented; and the more skill required for the type of work, the more rudimentary and barbaric the language they now spoke. But the holy tongue remained to those who had neither joined in the project nor praised it, but instead, thoroughly disdaining it, had made fun of the builders' stupidity."

"Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation."

"LANGUAGE, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure."

"It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language"

"Languages must be taken as organic natural bodies which form themselves according to definite laws."

"The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology."

"The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other."

"We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."

"Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups."

"Although excessive screen time is often frowned upon, language experts say that watching shows in a foreign language -- if done with near obsession -- can help someone learn that language. "These stories are hugely common," said Melissa Baese-Berk, associate professor of linguistics and director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teaching program at the University of Oregon. She points to a New York Times story about professional baseball players from Latin America who learned English by watching "Friends" with Spanish subtitles. But they didn't just watch "Friends"; they watched it over and over again. Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Freddy Galvis told the Times that he had watched every episode of the 10-season show at least five times. Stephen Snyder, dean of language schools at Middlebury College in Vermont, said this story sounds familiar to him. "Our Japanese classes are full of Chinese students and American students who grew up watching Japanese anime, and without having any formal training in Japanese, their comprehension is quite reasonable," he said. "It's a transnational phenomenon, and it makes sense." Baese-Berk says science supports what these young people have experienced. Studies show that it's best to acquire a language through both active and passive learning, and watching shows in a foreign language involves both. Trying to figure out a word that a character in a telenovela is saying would be an example of active learning, and admiring the character's outfit while hearing Spanish in the background would be an example of passive learning, she said."

"The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms."

"If you smile at me I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language."

"Many languages fly around the world producing sparks when they collide sometimes of hate sometimes of love"

"“Language is my homeland.”"

"In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned."

"Language may be said, in fact, to be the most indispensable instrument of civilization. It is the means whereby the whole life of the past has been handed to us in the present. It is the means whereby we in turn record, preserve, and transmit our science, our industrial methods, our laws, our customs. If human relations were possible at all without a language, they would have to begin anew, without any cultural inheritance, in each generation. Education, the transmitter of the achievements of the mature generation to the one maturing, is dependent on this unique human capacity to make seen marks and heard sounds stand for other things."

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

"Chant to him the holy song, the incantation sung in its chambers -- the incantation of Nudimmud: "On that day when there is no snake, when there is no scorpion, when there is no hyena, when there is no lion, when there is neither dog nor wolf, when there is thus neither fear nor trembling, man has no rival! At such a time, may the lands of Šubur and Ḫamazi, the many-tongued, and , the great mountain of the me of magnificence, and , the land possessing all that is befitting, and the Martu land, resting in security -- the whole universe, the well-guarded people -- may they all address Enlil together in a single language! ... Enki, the lord of abundance and of steadfast decisions, the wise and knowing lord of the Land, the expert of the gods, chosen for wisdom, the lord of Eridug, shall change the speech in their mouths, as many as he had placed there, and so the speech of mankind is truly one.""

"I am fascinated by how language can take shape through bold typography to inspire or demoralize, unite or divide, raise awareness or spread false beliefs."

"Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”"

"Okay, boys. Tonight's homework. Algebra: x to the nth + y to the nth = z to the nth. Well, you're never gonna use that, are you? Imperialism and the First World War. What was done is done. No point thinking about it now. German, French, Spanish. Ja, ja, oui, oui, si, si. It's nonsense. Everyone speaks English anyway. And if they don't, they ought to."

"Every time that the language question appears, in one mode or another, it signifies that a series of other problems are beginning to impose themselves: the formation and growth of the ruling class, the need to stabilize the most intimate and secure links between that ruling group and the popular national masses, that is, to reorganize cultural hegemony."

"Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself."

"I have no sympathy with the criticism which would treat English as a —a thing crystallised at an arbitrarily selected stage of its existence, and bidden to forget that it has a past and deny that it has a future. Purism, whether in or , almost always means ignorance. Language was made before grammar, not grammar before language. As for the people who make it their business to insist on the utmost possible impoverishment of our English vocabulary, they seem to me to ignore the lessons of history, science, and common-sense."

"Prophets hold a key to the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe."

"One of the results of the rapid depersonalization of our age is a crisis of speech, profanation of language. We have trifled with the name of God, we have taken the name and the word of the Holy in vain. Language has been reduced to labels, talk has become double-talk. We are in the process of losing faith in the reality of words. Yet prayer can happen only when words reverberate with power and inner life, when uttered as an earnest, as a promise. On the other hand, there is a high degree of obsolescence in the traditional language of the theology of prayer. Renewal of prayer calls for a renewal of language, of cleansing the words, of revival of meanings. The strength of faith is in silence, and in words that hibernate and wait. Uttered faith must come out as a surplus of silence, as the fruit of lived faith, of enduring intimacy. Theological education must deepen privacy, strive for daily renewal of innerness, cultivate ingredients of religious existence, reverence and responsibility."

"The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world."

"The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak half Czech and half German (...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arises envy, anger, conflict, strife and Czech humiliation."

"Language is the picture and counterpart of thought."

"A language survives through natural social use, not through staged symbols."

"I first said "No; that is the white man's God, and the white man's religion; and that God would not have anything to do with the Indians." …I thought that God could only understand English... I then met with Peter Jones, who was converted a few months before me, and, to my surprise, I hear him return thanks, at meal, in Ojibway. This was quite enough for me. I now saw that God could understand me in my Ojibway, and therefor went far into the woods and prayed, in the Ojibway tongue."

"Language is the dress of thought."

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."

"There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, "Once upon a time," the Director began, "while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.""

"Learning a language stretches a long way to help create trust, to strengthen our ability to communicate and to understand another people. It also signals willingness to give up centrality."

"When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world."

"We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us."

"Uniformism had created the demand that all people with an identical or similar literary language should draw together in common political units. Yet literary languages are usually artificial creations, coined by certain masters at a given moment in history and accepted by the upper classes. The English-speaking reader should bear in mind that the literary languages of the European continent are not of aristocratic or royal mark. "The King's English" has no equivalent either in the Germanic countries nor in the Mediterranean area. It usually is the upper bourgeoisie who speaks the literary, i.e., the artificially standardized language, with the greatest perfection, while there is often a "low-class" dialectical strain in the idiom of the nobility and even royalty. The Empress Maria Theresa spoke broadest Viennese, and this local dialect continued to be used by the Emperors of Austria until 1848. The late King of Saxony repeatedly used the Saxonian dialect, and argot expressions are far more widespread in aristocratic circles around Paris and Budapest than in the haute bourgeoisie, which always prided itself on a strongly standardized language, which is nothing else but an intranational Esperanto (understood and spoken everywhere inside the nation)."

"Words alike make the destiny of empires and of individuals. Ambition, love, hate, interest, vanity, have words for their engines, and need none more powerful. Language is a fifth element — the one by which all the others are swayed."

"… and French and Italian were, it must be owned, somewhat unnecessary to one who considered her own language an unnecessary fatigue."

"Henry Drummond: Language is a poor enough means of communication. I think we should use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damned few words that anybody understands!"

"Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation."

"For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us."

"How else can I say it? I don't speak no other languages."

"Men learned to speak in order to understand one another. Cultural languages have lost the ability to help men to advance beyond the most rudimentary level and attain understanding. It seems that the time has come to learn to be silent once again."

"Here it is fitting to remark that the study of the spontaneous growth of languages is of the utmost importance to those who would logically remodel them."

"Nothing in language is immutably fixed: the best writers are constantly changing it. Absolute government by dictionary would mean the arrest of this healthy process of change and growth."

"It is language and religion that make a people, but religion is even a more powerful agent than language."

"‘We cannot tell as yet what the language is. It may be the production of nature, a work of human art, or a divine gift….If it be a production of nature, it is her last and crowning production, which she reserved for man alone. If it be a work of human art, it would seem to lift the human artist almost to the level of a divine creator. If it be the gift of God, it is God’s greatest gift; for through it God spake to man and man speaks to God in worship, prayer and meditation’."

"No jobs, no people. No people, no . No Gaeltacht, no language."

"Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species."

"Literature has something to do with language. There's probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you'll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren't a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage."

"“Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”"

"“Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”"

"“Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation.”"

"It seems to me that the notion of 'a language' should not be regarded as scientifically reconstructable at all. We can say in very broad terms that a human language is a characteristic way of structuring expressions shared by a speech community; but that is extremely vague, and has to remain so. The vagueness is ineliminable, and unproblematic. Human languages are no more scientifically definable than human cultures, ethnic groups, or cities. The most we can say about what it means to say of a person that they speak Japanese is that the person knows, at least to some approximation, how to structure linguistic expressions in the Japanese way (with object before verb, and postpositions, and so on). But in scientific terms there is no such object as 'Japanese'."

"Ebbinghaus: Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time."

"I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media."

"…language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear."

"Experience is always larger than language."

"The politician manufactures a language - a vocabulary and a rhetoric - which, if you accept it as wholly adequate, leads inevitably to the answers he wants and to the actions he wants. But the prior question is whether the language is adequate to the facts. And as the poet is concerned with making language do new work and finding out the implications of language , his answer is always : no ."

"While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome"

"…basically, language is an inadequate and limited instrument. No matter what language a writer speaks, she always hopes that it will be universal, that it will transcend the particular ethnic barriers that language creates."

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation."

"It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves."

"A clever Toronto lawyer was deep into a technical argument before the Supreme Court. His position was dependent upon a close reading of the legal text and turned on the letter of the law. Suddenly the chief justice, Beverley McLachlin, leaned forward and asked the counsel if his argument also worked in French. After all, the law is the law in both languages and a loophole in one tends to evaporate in the other. Only an argument of substance stands up. The lawyer had no idea what to reply."

"Dick Grayson: Oh, heck! What's the use of learning French anyway?"

"He has strangled His language in his tears."

"Thou whoreson Zed! thou unnecessary letter!"

"You taught me language; and my profit on't Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you For learning me your language!"

"Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out At every joint and motive of her body."

"There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture."

"Language is its own music."

"Oh Lord God, deliver us from this prison, almost as it were, of paper, pen and ink, and of a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language."

"One can learn to speak a new language, but [learning] to embrace the weight of its meaning from its people, within Pacific contexts and mannerism, can never be replaced."

"Mutual understanding would be immensely facilitated by the use of one universal tongue. But which shall it be, is the great question. At present it looks as if the English might be adopted as such, though it must be admitted that it is not the most suitable. Each language, of course, excels in some feature.... A practical answer to that momentous question must perforce be found in times to come, for it is manifest that by adopting one common language the onward march of man would be prodigiously quickened. I do not believe that an artificial concoction, like Volapuk, will ever find universal acceptance, however time-saving it might be. That would be contrary to human nature. Languages have grown into our hearts."

"The story of man’s infatuation with his language is an unending one. In a remote village of Africa, a wise Dogon man used to say “to be naked is to be speechless.” Power, as unveiled by numerous contemporary writings, has always inscribed itself in language. Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion."

"Knowledge belongs to the one who succeeds in mastering a language."

"Language also reveals its power through an insignificant slip of the pen, for no matter how one tries to subject it to control and reduce it to “pure” instrumentality, it always succeeds in giving an inkling of its irreducible governing status."

"Anyone who invents a language,” he said, “finds that it requires a suitable habitation and a history in which it can develop. A real language is never invented, of course. It is a natural thing. It is wrong to call the language you grow up speaking your native language. It is not. It is your first learnt language. It is a by-product of the total make-up of the animal."

"Language is a human construct. The more vibrant and fast-moving society is, the more the language changes. That can be a wonderful thing. In fact, one of my favorite books to read in off-hours is H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, written by this genius when he was otherwise censored for his views in wartime. It’s a marvelous chronicling of the evolution of American usage, published in 1919, but oddly pertinent even today, applicable to the dwindling number of people who can still form coherent sentences. When it comes to vocabulary, there are two schools of thought broadly speaking: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist view is that words have embedded meanings that you can trace from other languages and should be used as intended. The descriptivist approach sees language as more a living experience, a tool of utility to make communication possible, in which case anything goes."

"That well known distinction between knowing that and knowing how fits the learning of a language....That is, we must distinguish between knowing how to speak or listen to words and knowing that about them. Learning a language is primarily the former."

"Verbing weirds language."

"We live in a time of acute bitterness and acrimony, where people’s first (and second and third) impulse is to brutalize, insult, embarrass and demean those who hold different views. The purpose of language, as they see it, isn’t to clarify or enlighten or reason together. It is to inflict the maximum pain possible on other human beings."

"Language itself inevitably introduced an element of permanence into the world. For, although speech itself is transitory, the conventionalized sound symbols of language transcended time. ...To obtain a greater degree of permanence the time symbols of oral speech had to be converted into the space symbols of written speech. ...The crucial stage in the evolution of writing occurred when ideographs became phonograms..."

"Speech is the best show a man puts on."

"There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other — by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought."

"Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later."

"Jede Zeit sagt, daß derzeit die Sprache so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht sei wie nie zuvor. In unserer Zeit aber ist die Sprache tatsächlich so gefährdet und von Zersetzung bedroht wie nie zuvor."

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language."

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

"For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either. p. 25"

"An entire mythology is stored within our language."

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

"But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness."

"Well languag'd Danyel."

"Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company."

"And who in time knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue? To what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, T' enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in th' yet unformed Occident May come refin'd with th' accents that are ours?"

"Who climbs the grammar-tree, distinctly knows Where noun, and verb, and participle grows."

"Language is fossil poetry."

"“A language, like a species, when extinct, never… reappears.”"

"And don't confound the language of the nation With long-tailed words in osity and ation."

"Language is the only instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas."

"L'accent du pays où l'on est né demeure dans l'esprit et dans le cœur comme dans le langage."

"Writ in the climate of heaven, in the language spoken by angels."

"La grammaire, qui sait régenter jusqu'aux rois, Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois."

"Une louange en grec est d'une merveilleuse efficace à la tête d'un livre."

"L'accent est l'âme du discours, il lui donne le sentiment et la vérité."

"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached"

"Syllables govern the world."

"Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam."

"Don Chaucer, well of English undefyled On Fame's eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled."

""We worked with a guy called Dr. Stuart Smith from UCLA and he’s an Egyptologist He put all this stuff on tape for us and it’s kind of the closest we can come to what we think the actual language sounded like. It’s like ancient Latin. When we speak Latin now we think it’s what it sounded like, but we’re not really sure. The problem with a lot of this Egyptian stuff is words like ‘look out’ become like 10 lines. Steve would go, ‘No, no, no. Lose the first four words. Say that word and then say the last word.’ So basically, I’d end up making the stuff up."

"Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language."

"The English language is my bitch. Or I don't speak it very well. Whatever."

"From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk."

"Oft on the dappled turf at ease I sit, and play with similes, Loose type of things through all degrees."

"A man of words and not of deeds, Is like a garden full of weeds..."

"Written words—in samizdat journals too numerous to list, legal independent Catholic journals like Tygodnik Powszechny, Znak, or Wiez, internal university publications, samizdat books from publishers like Krag, Nowa, or cdn, political programs, long and short, moderate and extreme; spoken words—in sermons, hymns, lectures, legal and illegal seminars, worker education groups, theaters, cabaret, unofficial cassettes; audiovisual words—wonderfully funny tapes from the satirist Jacek Fedorowicz, wonderfully serious tapes about Friedrich von Hayek, passed around on the country’s now numerous videocassette recorders; words, words, words."

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."

"Words are pegs to hang ideas on."

"Behind the word is silence, behind that silence is forgetfulness."

"When we desire to confine our words, we commonly say they are spoken under the rose."

"If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up."

"A very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arises from words."

"When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak."

""When I use a word", Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less". "The question is", said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things". "The question is", said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all"."

"Grasp the subject, the words will follow."

"Words matter. Words matter when you run for president. And they really matter when you are president."

"John Amos Comenius’ foundation principle was that a knowledge of things should precede the study of words; therefore an acquaintance with actual objects, as those of nature, science, and art, should precede the study of dialectics and rhetoric, so that these might not be a mere word-play without substance and meaning."

"Words have the power to release pent-up emotions as well as to define them in rational and meaningful terms."

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."

"Not only the tools of manual labour, but also the tools of human thought — words — are subject to the laws of historical development. The history of the meanings of words is outside the area of interest of formal logic, and could not be fruitfully studied by the methods of that discipline. The history of language in what is its most essential content is the history of language as a social instrument of thought; it is historical epistemology which cannot be studied within the scope of any other discipline. The linguist is of necessity only marginally interested in all conventional terminology, whereas certain votaries of formal logic are inclined to investigate domains which are alien to linguistics and even to some extent in contradiction to its basic assumptions!"

"As long as words a different sense will bear, And each may be his own interpreter, Our airy faith will no foundation find; The word's a weathercock for every wind."

"I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards."

"Our words have wings, but fly not where we would."

"I see more than this, more than I can tell you, More than there are words for. At this moment there is no decision to be made; The decision will be made by powers beyond us Which now and then emerge."

"The Letheri are masters at corrupting words, their meanings. They call war peace, they call tyranny liberty. On which side of the shadow you stand decides a word's meaning. Words are the weapons used by those who see others with contempt. A contempt which only deepens when they see how those others are deceived and made into fools because they choose to believe. Because in their naivety they thought the meaning of a word was fixed, immune to abuse."

"What if my words Were meant for deeds."

"And the One seated on the throne said: “Look! I am making all things new.” Also he says: “Write, for these words are faithful and true.”"

"'Tis a word that's quickly spoken, Which being restrained, a heart is broken."

"Purity of spirit lies at the beginning of things, there where the first stirrings set in, where conceptions of being and doing are formed. It is that initial authenticity in which the true meaning of words is grounded and their relation to each other is corrected, their edges are trimmed. Spirit becomes impure […] when it is indifferent to truth; when it no longer desires to think cleanly or to measure by the standards of eternity; […] when it besmudges the sense of words—which is the sense of things and of existence itself—robbing them of their austerity and nobility."

"The arrow belongs not to the archer when it has once left the bow; the word no longer belongs to the speaker when it has once passed his lips, especially when it has been multiplied by the press."

"Words and feathers the wind carries away."

"Any concepts or words which have been formed in the past through the interplay between the world and ourselves are not really sharply defined with respect to their meaning: that is to say, we do not know exactly how far they will help us in finding our way in the world. We often know that they can be applied to a wide range of inner or outer experience, but we practically never know precisely the limits of their applicability. This is true even of the simplest and most general concepts like "existence" and "space and time". Therefore, it will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. The concepts may, however, be sharply defined with regard to their connections... a group of connected concepts may be applicable to a wide field of experience and will help us to find our way in this field. But the limits of the applicability will in general not be known, at least not completely..."

"Words are women, deeds are men."

"Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real."

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

"Tristia mæstum Vultum verba decent; iratum, plena minarum; Ludentem, lasciva; severum, seria dictu."

"Delere licebit Quod non edideris; nescit vox missa reverti."

"Words are good servants but bad masters."

"For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it."

"I am coming quickly. Happy is anyone observing the words of the prophecy of this scroll."

"In every word of extenſive uſe, it was requiſite to mark the progreſs of its meaning, and ſhow by what gradations of intermediate ſenſe, it has paſſed from its primitive to its remote and accidental ſignification ; ſo that every foregoing explanation ſhould tend to that which follows, and the ſeries be regularly concantenated from the firſt notion to the laſt."

"Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking."

"Darkseid: I like you Glorious Godfrey! You're a shallow, precious child -- The Revelationist -- Happy with the sweeping sound of words!"

"... we English people delight in a moral — not a moral to be deduced or inferred, but a nice, rounded, little moral, in all the starch of set sentences, and placed just at the end."

"'Tis a strange mystery, the power of words ! Life is in them, and death. A word can send The crimson colour hurrying to the cheek, Hurrying with many meanings; or can turn The current cold and deadly to the heart. Anger and fear are in them ; grief and joy Are on their sound ; yet slight, impalpable:— A word is but a breath of passing air."

"Without approval and without scorn, but carefully studying the sentences word by word, one should trace them in the Discourses (Sutta) and verify them by the Discipline (Vinaya). If they are neither traceable in the Discourses nor verifiable by the Discipline, one must conclude thus: ‘Certainly, this is not the Blessed One’s utterance; this has been misunderstood by that bhikkhu — or by that community, or by those elders, or by that elder.’ In that way, bhikkhus, you should reject it."

"Every word carries its own surprises and offers its own rewards to the reflective mind. Their amazing variety is a constant delight. I do not believe that I am alone in this—a fascination with words is shared by people in all countries and all walks of life."

"With high words, that bore Semblance of worth, not substance."

"Yet hold it more humane, more heav'nly, first, By winning words to conquer willing hearts, And make persuasion do the work of fear."

"A word may denote to an advocate something which he wishes an audience to understand; yet it may have connotations which will produce an antagonistic impression. The result is ambiguity leading to misunderstanding of meaning."

"Our words are not rough, unhewn stones, left at our door by a glacial moraine; they are blocks that have been brought to light by immense labour, that have been carved, measured and weighted again, before they became what we find them to be. Our poets make poems out of words, but every word, if carefully examined, will turn out to be itself a petrified poem, a reward of a deed done or a thought thought by those to whom we owe the whole of our intellectual inheritance, the capital on which we live, with which we speculate and strive to grow richer from day to day."

"For the word of God is alive and exerts power and is sharper than any two-edged sword and pierces even to the dividing of soul and spirit, and of joints and [their] marrow, and [is] able to discern thoughts and intentions of [the] heart. 13 And there is not a creation that is not manifest to his sight, but all things are naked and openly exposed to the eyes of him with whom we have an accounting."

"There is something indecent in words."

"I’ve touched some sentences and have kissed some words."

""Strength of creative writing lies in the skill of handling words and articulating artistic expression of feelings.”"

""In influencing write-ups, words seem to move despite residing still on paper.”"

"“In many a situation, the images that words hide while walking forth are the desired meaning of particular words rather than the word itself. Those words sing and dance by coming out of the paper.”"

"“Language is texture of images and music. We speak in images and rhythm, by taking help of words.”"

"Words are like leaves; and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found."

"In Words, as Fashions, the same Rule will hold; Alike Fantastick, if too New, or Old; Be not the first by whom the New are try'd, Nor yet the last to lay the Old aside."

"We can judge the intent of the parties only by their words."

"A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger."

"I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue; I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked is before me."

"Judas: I remember when this whole thing began No talk of God then, we called you a man And believe me, my admiration for you hasn't died. But every word you say today Gets twisted round some other way And they'll hurt if they think you've lied."

"Mr. Wilson says of the trust plank in that platform that it "did not anywhere condemn monopoly except in words." Exactly of what else could a platform consist? Does Mr. Wilson expect us to use algebraic signs? This criticism is much as if he said the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence contained nothing but words."

"The mastery of longer-syllabled words in the English language is no doubt admirable but it is not equivalent to thinking. And I do believe that thinking is an overrated medium for achieving thought."

"Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play."

"My father still reads the dictionary everyday. He says your life depends on your ability to master words."

"Syllables govern the world."

"What art thou? Have not I An arm as big as thine? a heart as big? Thy words, I grant, are bigger, for I wear My dagger in my mouth."

"What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words."

"Unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing, like a very drab."

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

"Familiar in his mouth as household words."

"'Tis well said again; And 'tis a kind of good deed to say well: And yet words are no deeds."

"But yesterday the word of Cæsar might Have stood against the world; now lies he there, And none so poor to do him reverence."

"Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words Since I first call'd my brother's father dad."

"O they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon."

"Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, Figures pedantical."

"Madam, you have bereft me of all words, Only my blood speaks to you in my veins."

"Here are a few of the unpleasant'st words That ever blotted paper!"

"His very words are a fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes."

"But words are words; I never yet did hear That the bruis'd heart was pierced through the ear."

"I know thou'rt full of love and honesty, And weigh'st thy words before thou givest them breath."

"How long a time lies in one little word! Four lagging winters and four wanton springs End in a word: such is the breath of kings."

"O, but they say the tongues of dying men Enforce attention like deep harmony: Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. He that no more must say is listen'd more."

"These words are razors to my wounded heart."

"Words pay no debts, give her deeds."

"Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart; Th' effect doth operate another way."

"Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them."

"A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off."

"Words are but holy as the deeds they cover."

"The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken."

"Words that warmed women, wooed and won them, snipped the final thread of inhibition and gratified the male egos of ungrateful lovers; ... for which they were eternally in his debt, for which they may eternally hate him."

"For some queer and deplorable reason most human beings are more impressed by words than by figures, to the great disadvantage of mankind."

"A word is no more than a means to an end. Its an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself. The word honey isn't honey. You can study and talk about honey for as long as you like, but you won' t really know it until you taste it. After you have tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points?"

"The reverse also applies: If, for whatever reason, you disliked the word honey, that might prevent you from ever tasting it. If you had a strong aversion to the word God, which is a negative form of attachment, you may be denying not just the word but also the reality to which it points. You would be cutting yourself off from the possibility of experiencing that reality. All this is, of course, intrinsically connected with being identified with your mind.So, if a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work. If you don't like the word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt."

"I know words. I have the best words."

"Although we acquire the skill of understanding words by experience, so that we know the correlations between them and things, between words and other words, and between words and feelings and actions, we do not do it by inductive reasoning. Nor must we think that we do it by deductive reasoning... In the main, words are cues rather than clues."

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning."

"Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe."

"[A]nybody who has served in combat in any way understands that words are weapons. And I'm in a war. The war hasn't stopped. I've always used the books as a blunt instrument."

"Dat inania verba, Dat sine mente sonum."

"Words of truth and soberness."

"Words, as a Tartar's bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment."

"Words of affection, howsoe'er express'd, The latest spoken still are deem'd the best."

"'Twas he that ranged the words at random flung, Pierced the fair pearls and them together strung."

"You have only, when before your glass, to keep pronouncing to yourself nimini-pimini; the lips cannot help taking their plie."

"Boys flying kites haul in their white winged birds; You can't do that way when you're flying words. "Careful with fire," is good advice we know "Careful with words," is ten times doubly so. Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead; But God Himself can't kill them when they're said."

"High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge."

"The Moral is that gardeners pine, Whene'er no pods adorn the vine. Of all sad words experience gleans, The saddest are: "It might have beans." (I did not make this up myself: 'Twas in a book upon my shelf. It's witty, but I don't deny It's rather Whittier than I)."

"Words writ in waters."

"Words are but empty thanks."

"Fair words butter no parsnips."

"Mum's the word."

"Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men."

"Words that weep, and tears that speak."

"Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism are all very good words for the lips; especially prunes and prism."

"But words once spoke can never be recall'd."

"It used to be a common saying of Myson's that men ought not to seek for things in words, but for words in things; for that things are not made on account of words but that words are put together for the sake of things."

"I trade both with the living and the dead for the enrichment of our native language."

"And torture one poor word ten thousand ways."

"Let thy words be few."

"Let no man deceive you with vain words."

"An undisputed power Of coining money from the rugged ore, Nor less of coining words, is still confessed, If with a legal public stamp impressed."

"New words and lately made shall credit claim If from a Grecian source they gently stream."

"That blessed word Mesopotamia."

"Der Worte sind genug gewechselt, Lasst mich auch endlich Thaten sehn."

"Gewöhnlich glaubt der Mensch, wenn er nur Worte hört, Es müsse sich dabei doch auch was denken."

"Es macht das Volk sich auch mit Worten Lust."

"At this every lady drew up her mouth as if going to pronounce the letter P."

"If of all words of tongue and pen, The saddest are, "It might have been," More sad are these we daily see, "It is, but it hadn't ought to be.""

"For words are wise men's counters—they do but reckon by them—but they are the money of fools."

"Words sweet as honey from his lips distill'd."

"Winged words."

"Words are the soul's ambassadors, who go Abroad upon her errands to and fro."

"How forcible are right words!"

"Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?"

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven."

"To make dictionaries is dull work."

"Like orient pearls at random strung."

"The masterless man … afflicted with the magic of the necessary words…. Words that may become alive and walk up and down in the hearts of the hearers."

"We might have been—these are but common words, And yet they make the sum of life's bewailing."

"We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves."

"Speaking words of endearment where words of comfort availed not."

"My words are little jars For you to take and put upon a shelf. Their shapes are quaint and beautiful, And they have many pleasant colours and lustres To recommend them. Also the scent from them fills the room With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses."

"There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on."

"Ein Wörtlein kann ihn fällen."

"Some grave their wrongs on marble; He, more just, Stooped down serene, and wrote them in the dust."

"Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things."

"Words that weep, and strains that agonise."

"Strains that sigh and words that weep."

"It is as easy to draw back a stone thrown with force from the hand, as to recall a word once spoken."

"Words, however, are things; and the man who accords To his language the license to outrage his soul, Is controll'd by the words he disdains to control."

"How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!"

"His words, * * * like so many nimble and airy servitors, trip about him at command."

"And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one."

"How many quarrels, and how important, has the doubt as to the meaning of this syllable "Hoc" produced for the world!"

"Words repeated again have as another sound, so another sense."

"So spake those wary foes, fair friends in look, And so in words great gifts they gave and took, And had small profit, and small loss thereby."

"The word impossible is not in my dictionary."

"Things were first made, then words."

"Hei mihi, quam facile est (quamvis hic contigit omnes), Alterius lucta fortia verba loqui!"

"Non opus est verbis, credite rebus."

"Le monde se paye de paroles; peu approfondissement les choses."

"In pertusum ingerimus dicta dolium, operam ludimus."

"Words will build no walls."

"Each word-catcher, that lives on syllables."

"They say * * * That, putting all his words together, 'Tis three blue beans in one blue bladder."

"A word spoken in good season, how good is it!"

"A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver."

"The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart; his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords."

"Inanis verborum torrens."

"Souvent d'un grand dessein un mot nous fait juger."

"He that useth many words for the explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttle fish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink."

"One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other."

"Satis eloquentiæ sapientiæ parum."

"Schnell fertig ist die Jugend mit dem Wort."

"O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!"

"We know not what we do When we speak words."

"So all my best is dressing old words new."

"The arts Babblative and Scriblative."

"The artillery of words."

"But from sharp words and wits men pluck no fruit; And gathering thorns they shake the tree at root; For words divide and rend, But silence is most noble till the end."

"I have not skill From such a sharp and waspish word as "No" To pluck the sting."

"I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. * * * * * In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold; But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more."

"Dictum sapienti sat est."

"As the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, "Adsum!" and fell back. It was the word we used at school, when names were called; and lo, he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of The Master."

"Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word, And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird."

"Hold fast the form of sound words."

"As shadows attend substances, so words follow upon things."

"You [Pindar] who possessed the talent of speaking much without saying anything."

"You phrase tormenting fantastic chorus, With strangest words at your beck and call."

"For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: "It might have been!""

"Would you repeat that again, sir, for it soun's sae sonorous that the words droon the ideas?"

"Three sleepless nights I passed in sounding on, Through words and things, a dim and perilous way."

"Fair words enough a man shall find, They be good cheap: they cost right nought, Their substance is but only wind."

"There is no magic in words."

"Most of the disputes in the world arise from words."

"Rather commend yourself by your actions, than your expressions; one good action is worth twenty good expressions."

"Words pass from men lightly."

"The words are like Jack in a Box, and nobody knows what to make of them."

"Is not the Judge bound to know the meaning of all words in the English language; or if they are used technically or scientifically, to inform his own mind by evidence, and then to determine the meaning?"

"Qiue ad unumfinem loqunta sunt, non debent ad alium detorqueri: Those words which are spoken to one end, ought not to be perverted to another."

"Nay, gentlemen, do not quarrel about words."

"He says one thing, but he does another; it seems to me to be common sense to look at what is done, and not to what is said."

"We must judge of men's intentions by their acts, and not by expressions in letters, which are contrary to their acts."

"Words are transient, and vanish in the air as soon as spoken, and there can be no tenor of them . . . but when a thing is written, though every omission of a letter may not make a variance, yet, if such omission makes a word of another signification, it is fatal."

"[D]edicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it."

"Today, if somebody comes up with a new phrase or word, it is spread instantly. Instead of weeks and months, now it takes milliseconds. It doesn't mean these terms will last forever, just that they're suddenly here."

"You'd have to ask Bill Clinton or Bob Dole why it was so important. We are merely recognizing its importance."

"The term goes back 50 years, but you can't turn on the radio or television without hearing about 'weapons of mass destruction'."

"There is no scientific method of determining which words or phrases will be named words-of-the-year. It's kind of like Time magazine determining the whistle-blowers were the person-of-the-year. There is no objective way of determining it. It's all done with a show of hands."

"Language changes, and you cannot stop it. It's just like any other part of human culture."

"We dismissed one potential problem—that newspapers wouldn't print the term if it won—on the grounds that we shouldn't censor ourselves. And indeed, in the afternoon's voting, santorum did win, but many newspapers simply skipped this category in their coverage. So much for academic freedom."

"When you have investment companies losing billions of dollars over something like bundled subprime loans, then you have to consider whether it's important. You probably also want to think about paying off that third mortgage."

"Yeah, that was a surprise to me. I thought it might be something like texting or blog, but people decided that Google - and the argument from the floor from one of our members was that a lot of people blog, millions of people blog, but everybody googles, young and old. It's so generic that people go to Yahoo and google. So, it's google with a lower-case G."

"It's a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement. The movement itself was powered by the word."

"Systematic American dialect research began with the formation of the American Dialect Society in 1889."

"Since 1990, the American Dialect Society has included in its annual meeting a vote on Words of the Year, the words that were most notable, prominent, and characteristic of the discourse of the year just past."

"The American Dialect Society was founded in 1889 with the goal of compiling a dialect dictionary of the United States."

"The initial hope of the American Dialect Society was to provide a body of data from which a dialect dictionary or series of linguistic maps might be derived."

"Since 1889, dialectologists in English-speaking North America have affiliated themselves with the American Dialect Society, an association which in its first constitution defined its object as "the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada, and incidentally of other non-aboriginal dialects spoken in the same countries.""

"Flexitarian was voted Most Useful Word in 2003 by the American Dialect Society, a fact widely publicized in the press."

"Members of the American Dialect Society (www.americandialect.org) study English language use among people living in North America. They analyze how other languages influence English-speaking North Americans, and how, in turn, North Americans influence speakers of other languages."

"The early work of the American Dialect Society reflects the wide reach and the overlapping linguistic and literary interests centered on language study at the end of the century."

"Serious wordinistas will be waiting for the linguistic Oscars, when the American Dialect Society makes its selection in January."

"While astrophysicists were downgrading the cosmic object we call Pluto, the American Dialect Society, which is more than a century old, was upgrading the status of the word Pluto to a verb, making it their 17th annual 'Word of the Year' for 2006."

"The American Dialect Society (ADS; americandialect.org), identifies the most influential words of the year. For example, ADS members voted tweet as the Word of the Year for 2009 and google as the word of the decade. Ten years earlier, Y2K was the top choice, web was the word of the decade, and jazz was the word of the century."

"According to Ethnologue, there are approximately 7,105 living languages in the world."

"World Population is 6,716,664,407, Living Languages are 7,105 comprising institutional: 682, Developing: 1,534, Vigorous: 2,502, In Trouble: 1,481, Dying: 906."

"...that parents are no longer teaching the language to their children and are not using it actively in everyday matters."

"What are you waiting for? Don’t ask permission to save your language. Just do it."

"An alternate version: First of all, never ask permission to save your language. Do not … If there are three or four of you in the community who want to start a small tribal language school, then go ahead and do it, but if you ask permission, what do you think you will be told? … Second, don't wait around for some big federal grant. Do it . The Hebrew language was once spoken by only a few thousand..."

"Languages are always changing but in many cases the life of a language ends. In many areas of the world, economic, military, social and other pressures are causing communities to stop speaking their traditional languages, and turn to other, typically more dominant, languages. This can be a social, cultural and scientific disaster because languages express the unique knowledge, history and worldview of their communities; and each language is a specially evolved variation of the human capacity for communication."

"The Foundation for Endangered Languages supports, enables and assists the documentation, protection and promotion of endangered languages."

"You probably know that many of the world's plants and animals are in danger of extinction, but did you know that many human languages are in danger of becoming extinct, too? Globalization has helped to make the world a smaller place. But it has also contributed to the loss of many languages around the world. Every two weeks another language disappears forever! Once a language is lost, humanity loses a part of our rich heritage. Helping to preserve endangered languages is important to keep traditions alive."

"The Gaelic-speaking East Sutherland fisherfolk have in one sense already been proven 'wrong', in that some of the youngest members of their own kin circles have begun to berate them for choosing not to transmit the ancestral language and so allowing it to die."

"The staying power of endangered languages must be intimately tied to a thousand intimate or small-scale network processes, processes too gratifying and rewarding to surrender even if they do not quite amount to the pursuit of higher reaches of power and modernity."

"It might be said with a certain metaphoric license that languages are seldom admired to death but are frequently despised to death."

"...for endangered languages must take into account the potential of economic issues to outweigh all others combined, although this a potential, not an absolute: ranking economic concerns higher than other variables is not tantamount to assigning economic factors complete supremacy."

"The majority of endangered languages come from oral culture, where converting the language to a written form poses certain consequences for the continued use of these languages."

"About 6,000 different languages are spoken around the world. But the Foundation for Endangered Languages estimates that between 500 and 1,000 of those are spoken by only a handful of people. And every year the world loses around 25 mother tongues. That equates to losing 250 languages over a decade - a sad prospect for some."

"And when languages are lost most of the knowledge that went with them gets lost. People do care about identity as they want to be different. Nowadays we want access to everything but we don't want to be thought of as no more than people on the other side of the world."

"In one sense you could call it a cultural loss. But that makes no sense because cultural forms are lost all the time. To say every cultural form should exist forever is ridiculous. And when governments try to prop languages up, it shows a desire to cling to the past rather than move forwards."

"To have a public policy that a certain culture or language should be preserved shows a fundamental misunderstanding. I don't see why it's in the public good to preserve Manx or Cornish or any other language for that matter. In the end, whether or not a language is viable is very simple. If a language is one that people don't participate in, it's not a language anymore."

"Language is not a plant that rises and falls, lives and decays. It's a tool that's perfectly adapted by the people using it. Get on with living and talking."

"GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction."

"Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to."

"Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express."

"Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political."

"If all commas were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning."

"I learned how important grammar is, that part of the understanding process is grammatical. That’s how I taught myself to write prose. I kept learning and learning. I’d come into my class and say, “Guess what I found out last night. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.” I learned that grammar was not arbitrary, that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing as well as restrictive."

"Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam."

"the errors of Grammarians have arisen from supposing all words to be immediately either the signs of things or the signs of ideas: whereas in fact many words are merely abbreviations employed for despatch, and are the signs of other words. And that these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated."

"And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand."

"The tribes living on the east of Jordan, separated from their brethren on the west by the deep ravines and the rapid river, gradually came to adopt peculiar customs, and from mixing largely with the Moabites, Ishmaelites, and Ammonites to pronounce certain letters in such a manner as to distinguish them from the other tribes. Thus when the Ephraimites from the west invaded Gilead, and were defeated by the Gileadites under the leadership of Jephthah, and tried to escape by the "passages of the Jordan," the Gileadites seized the fords and would allow none to pass who could not pronounce "shibboleth" with a strong aspirate. This the fugitives were unable to do. They said "sibboleth," as the word was pronounced by the tribes on the west, and thus they were detected (Judg.12:1-6). Forty-two thousand were thus detected, and "Without reprieve,adjudged to death, for want of well-pronouncing shibboleth."

"Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics."

"Even socialists, Marxists, and revolutionaries seem to have lost their belief in the future; the old shibboleths come rolling off their lips, but it is as if they cannot keep the scales from dropping from their eyes."

"Dear well meaning poseur, atheist, and other people hostile to Christianity — these are shibboleths of the damned. If you throw these out, it is an immediate signal you are more likely than not destined for hell fire."

"Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:---touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too."

"The fish oil shibboleth is only the latest to be overturned in recent years. Vitamin supplements and fibre have also been found to provide no benefits."

"Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence."

"The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and reality, society. Modernisation is to work towards this."

"Class size is another shibboleth: First, small class sizes do not increase learning, and, second, class sizes have become quite small anyway."

"For most of the well-to-do in the town, dinner was a shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind."

"It [“H” dropping in accents] has never been a characteristic of middle-class or upper-class speech: on the contrary, it is perhaps the strongest social shibboleth to exist in the accents of England."

"Shibboleth is a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning."

"Shibboleth is a widely held belief."

"Shibboleth is a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group."

"It is a custom or usage [Shibboleth] regarded as distinguishing one group from others."

"We knew that their claim of giving “the best deal in town” was just a shibboleth."

"She repeated the old shibboleth that time heals all wounds. Hebrew shibbōleth stream; from the use of this word in Judg 12:6 as a test to distinguish Gileadites from Ephraimites. First Known Use is 1638."

"A shibboleth is a test which separates friends from enemies, insiders from outsiders, the trustworthy from the suspect."

"After the English crown lost its grip on its French possessions, and France became an enemy, the English nobility began to speak English. But they still needed a shibboleth to separate themselves from the peasantry, and so they created their own English, the English of the privileged and the learned. This English had a grammar based on Latin, which is why it forbade structures natural to English, but foreign to Latin, such as the split infinitive (to boldly go) or the ending of a sentence with a preposition (the sort of arrant pedantry up with which Churchill reputedly refused to put)."

"These particular latinate shibboleths are rarely insisted upon today in “standard” English, but grammatical shibboleths still abound; that is, linguistic conventions and usages that do not exist to convey meaning, but are recommended simply because they are “correct”. “Correct,” that is, not because they are necessary for communication to occur, but because they conform to an established standard."

"If you can tell what the author of the offending passage meant, then any lapses from the standard are matters of shibboleth, not essential meaning. If you can “correct” the passage without any doubt as to its meaning, then you are correcting violations of shibboleths."

"Label me as an “Old School” stickler, but I believe the quality of grammer you use when communicating with others says a lot about your character. I suppose there is a time and place for slang or the use of acronyms, emoticons etc., and I can deal with that. I can even understand that there might be mistakes in a translation. But when someone uses “then” when it should be “than”, I want to pull out the rest of my hair. I think this kind of misuse says “I don’t care enough to know which word is the right word to use” or “I wasn’t paying attention in grammer classes”. Either way, I sense a lack of professionalism."

"If you do not respect and obey the shibboleths of grammar, orthography, and style, people will not regard you as a professional. The function of these shibboleths is specifically to separate the professional from the unprofessional, just as classically their function was to separate the nobility from the peasantry."

"These shibboleths are no longer the shibboleths of professionalism, they are the shibboleths only of sticklers."

"In a sense, knowing that these latinate forms are now considered moribund is itself a kind of super-shibboleth, separating the grammatical elite from the common stickler."

"Adherence to standard grammar rules is no longer a shibboleth of either the educated or the the professional. People who demonstrate their professionalism and expertise in other ways are given a pass on lax grammar and awkward style"

"The simple fact is that people do not judge the reliability of community content by its grammatical purity, a shibboleth that is meaningless to them. They judge it by other measures, such as the grasp of the subject matter that the author displays, or the respect that the author has earned from other members of the community."

"Professors of the humanities have long been desperate to make their subjects accord with modernity instead of a challenge to it. … The effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime, ever since “the intentional fallacy” was instituted. There are endless debates about methods—among Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstructionism, and many others, all of which have in common the premise that what Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant. These schools of criticism make the writers plants in a garden planned by a modem scholar, while their own garden-planning vocation is denied them."

"If in one way or another a person is afraid of being unable to maintain an overview of something that is multifarious and prolix, he tries to make or acquire a brief summary of the whole for the sake of a full view. For example, death is the briefest summary of life, or life traced back to its briefest form. This is also why it has always been very important to those who truly think about human life to test again and again, with the help of the briefest summary, what they have understood about life."

"Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstance. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity, and inaction."

"The Seventies French fad was a flight from Sixties truths, a reactionary escape into false abstraction and rationalism, masquerading as distrust of reason."

"May I show a true model of deconstruction to Derrida by taking off parts that make up my being!"

"Those who say that all historical accounts are ideological constructs (which is one version of the idea that there is really no historical truth) rely on some story which must itself claim historical truth. They show that supposedly "objective" historians have tendentiously told their stories from some particular perspective; they describe, for example, the biasses that have gone into constructing various histories of the United States. Such an account, as a particular piece of history, may very well be true, but truth is a virtue that is embarrassingly unhelpful to a critic who wants not just to unmask past historians of America but to tell us that at the end of the line there is no historical truth. It is remarkable how complacent some "deconstructive" histories are about the status of the history that they deploy themselves."

"And, while it is unlikely anyone is really taken in by such doublespeak --- public opinion is not as easily manipulated as George Orwell's would suggest –- research carried out by people like Elizabeth Loftus shows that loaded language does work to influence memory and perception."

"We live in a politically polarized environment. In an ideological war one side or another will try to use language as a weapon. If you’re writing a report, one of the things reporters are taught to avoid is loaded language."

"Loaded words appeal to emotion rather than to reason. A copywriter using loaded language might describe a company as carrying on the tradition of free enterprise while claiming that a competitor is price gouging. A politician might call himself a progressive while calling an opponent a do-gooder."

"Loaded language provides many possibilities for obstacles to clear thinking."

"What political analysts commonly call newspeak is in fact a “formative” language that provides its audience with meaningless phrases so that people will not think about what they are hearing but simply accept what they are hearing, according to Moscow anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova."

"Loaded language about hate risks alienating the very audience that needs to be engaged with."

"It tends to be a feature of warlike situations that opponents' actions are viewed in the blackest possible light, with morally-loaded language reflecting that interpretation, while one's own, or one's allies' actions are treated in the most favourable light."

"The politically and emotionally loaded language Russian media has used to describe the new authorities in Kyiv, dubbing them 'fascists' and 'anti-Semites,' is also reminiscent of Serbia's characterization of its opponents. Croats were characterized as 'ustashi' and Bosniaks, or Bosnian muslims, as 'mujahedin.' This is how wars begin. This is how societies are mobilized to hate. Ordinary citizens are subjected to fear and propaganda eventually eroding the trust in other ethnic groups, other nationalities."

"The loaded language proceeds according to the Orwellian recipe of the identity of opposites: in the mouth of the enemy, peace means war, and defense is attack, while on the righteous side, escalation is restraint, and saturation bombing prepares for peace. Organized in this discriminatory fashion, language designates a priori the enemy as evil in his entirety and in all his actions and intentions."

"It is so easy for human thinking to become distorted that it makes sense to examine how we can keep our own thinking straight and thus avoid calamity. Importantly, we need to be on guard against the trickery of men. Make no mistake, you will encounter deceitful people who pretend to present the truth but actually distort it. To attain their objectives such people may resort to a selective use of evidence, emotionally loaded language, misleading half-truths, devious innuendo, and even outright lies.|"

"To appeal to reason, you use facts, statistics, expert opinions, and examples that support your position. To appeal to emotion, you use emotionally-loaded language — language that elicits a strong positive or negative response."

"Politically loaded language is inappropriate for news headlines regardless of substantive content."

"What is shown is that typical ethical argumentation in everyday discourse is saturated with emotionally loaded language, and is highly persuasive in nature. Some insights derived from the emotivist view can be extremely useful in explaining how ethical argumentation works. Ethical arguments arise out of conflicts of values in which there is a pro-attitude viewpoint on both sides. Both sides use emotionally loaded language of a kind that supports one's viewpoint and that expresses opposition to the viewpoint of the other side."

"Although milieu control is more obvious in the situation of a prisoner whose environment is forced on him, spiritual purgation often begins with a similar structuring of a person's physical environment."

"This kind of 'milieu control' can be brought about through coercion, Lifton believed, but at its most successful it convinces the subject that he or she is acting spontaneously rather than being directed by values that are alien to the self."

"'Milieu Control' involves the control of daily schedule including food intake, sleep, information and time and space for critical reflection."

"In applying Erikson's totalism concept to the Thought Reform experiences of his subjects, Lifton famously identified eight 'themes' of the totalistic milieu: Milieu Control, i.e., monopoly of the spatial and informational environment."

"The totalist administrators 'look upon milieu control as a just and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret.' The assumption of 'omniscience' and 'ultimate truth' leads these administrators to consider it 'their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this 'truth."

"This may be called milieu control. The Chinese Communist prison is probably the most thoroughly controlled and manipulated group environment that has ever existed."

"The milieu control exerted over the broader social environment of Communist China, while considerably less intense, is in its own way unrivalled in its combination of extensiveness and depth; it is, in fact, one of the distinguishing features of Chinese Communist practice."

"This kind of 'milieu control' can be brought about through coercion, but at its most successful it convinces individuals that they are acting autonomously — as is the case for the ex-POW Sergeant Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. The result is that milieu control disrupts the 'balance between self and the outside world', resulting in 'a profound threat to [the individual's] personal autonomy'."

"A reliable system of indoctrination requires nearly total 'milieu control' in which the indoctrinatee has few or no alternate sources of information and values."

"Such accounts are consistent with what Lifton described as 'milieu control', a key aspect of ideological totalism. As Lifton postulated it, this is primarily the use of techniques to dominate the person's contact with the outside world but also their communication with themselves."

"The first is that of total milieu control — control of all information exchange and imagery in an environment that seeks to extend itself to internal controls of every kind."

"A second way in which milieu control is affects group members is linked to groups' conscious efforts in that regard. That is, the groups maintain milieu control especially by way of labeling recalcitrant members as 'subjective' or 'objective agent.' The former term is used for those who are thought to have harmed the organization by their mistakes or failures in groups' operations."

"He didn't want to hear any new-age psychobabble, like 'find your inner peace."

"For the various psychological and self-help theories that abound among educated upper-middle class circles is called psychobabble."

"Just as bad, to declare everyone an addict may be even more psychobabble about people's compulsive, self-indulgent habits in need of the one true cure from the latest self-help regimen."

"Let's knock out the psychobabble. He was a pervert, a child molester, he was a pedophile. And to be giving this much coverage to him, day in and day out, what does it say about us as a country? I just think we're too politically correct. No one wants to stand up and say we don't need Michael Jackson. He died, he had some talent, fine. There's men and women dying every day in Afghanistan. Let's give them the credit they deserve."

"Maybe we should give to charity or do some volunteer work; helping humanity one person at a time should only take forever. Better still, how about reading another self-help book written by some new-age, psychobabble guru that shows how to obtain spiritual contentment and financial success? That'll do the trick; there's nothing quite like putting our heads in the sand."

"Bush dismissed as 'psychobabble' comments in reviews of his book about a presumed need to prove himself to his father or to history, specifically over Iraq and his failure to write about it."

"The psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés."

"Horatio: [About reporting Eric's lost badge to IAB.] Ok, but you've done nothing wrong. Eric: Then how come I feel like I'm going to slit my own throat? Eric [to IAB Rick Stetler] That's a bunch of psychobabble...crap."

"Joey: You know, maybe-- and this is just a shot in the dark-- she didn't mean to send it to the gossips at large. Maybe she's just trying to get some private closure, never dreamed she'd be subjected to the Oprah psychobabble of her life-lacking peers. Now, do you guys want something to eat, or should I just bring over a nice tray of bon-bons so you guys can hunker down and watch your stories?"

"Brennan: Sweets has trust issues involving finding a home. Since he grew up an orphan, the anger he's sublimated has paralyzed him from developing a healthy perspective on what having a home means. That made him bond with us and our home so he didn't have to deal with his own emotional insecurities. Booth: Bones shoots from the outside! Three points! Sweets: Where's that psychobabble coming from? Booth: Well, you left one of your psychobabble books in our bathroom."

"[to Bishop, after offering her anger management counseling] You would do that for me? I appreciate that. I really do. But I think I'd rather you just WASH THE FUCKING DISHES AND SHUT THE FUCK UP! Fucking psychobabble bullshit asshole!"

"Maria: Look, you wanna know why you look like Grandpa 1935? She has the key. So, you have two choices, all right? You can let her in on the whole alien conspiracy thing and hope that it shakes something loose from the dusty corners of her brain, or you can... No. You know what? That's not gonna work, so look... You have that one option, all right? Michael: No, no, no. What's my second option? Maria: You're not capable of it, I promise. Michael: Just say it. Maria: Form an emotional bond with Laurie. [Michael shakes his head] All right, fine. You don't like that answer, then go show her the secret alien handshake. Michael: [sighs] Okay, fine. What kind of psychobabble, Oprah crap do I gotta tell her? Maria: I can't put the words in your mouth, Michael. It's gotta come from you. It's gotta come from your-- it's gotta come from whatever organ you have sitting in for your heart. Just go over there and tell her in your own words that she can trust you, and make sure that she feels that you're being completely, emotionally honest."

"We've all had the experience of talking about a long-lost friend with someone, and then out of the blue the phone rings and it's that same long-lost friend. Famous psychobabble quack Carl Jung called these occurrences "synchronicity." Skeptics regard these synchronicities events as mere coincidences. Others posit a pie-in-the-sky cosmic connection linking all things. Take a guess on which side of the argument I fall."

"What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used."

"The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin."

"Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task."

"Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean."

"[Today’s jargon] was produced by philosophy and was in Europe known to have been produced by philosophy, so that it paved a road to philosophy. In America its antecedents remain unknown. We took over the results without having had any of the intellectual experiences leading to them. But the ignorance of the origins and the fact that American philosophy departments do not lay claim to them—are in fact just as ignorant of them as is the general public—means that the philosophic content of our language and lives does not direct us to philosophy. This is a real difference between the Continent and us. Here the philosophic language is nothing but jargon."

"More often than we are aware, it is the jargon which is the hurdle that a student cannot overcome rather than the mathematical concepts being introduced. After all, virtually every profession has realized the advantage of inventing sufficient jargon to ensure that it is held in respect by the layman! In teaching, however, our aim should be to pull down barriers, not erect them."

"Jargon or gobbledygook, or what people who live in Washington or Ottawa call "federal prose," [is] the gabble of abstractions and vague words which avoids any simple or direct statement. ... Direct and simple language always has some force behind it, and the writers of gobbledygook don't want to be forceful; they want to be soothing and reassuring."

"Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists."

"Margaret Mead noted... that scientists at the frontier, where the terminology and imagery are developed, speak mostly to other scientists at or near their own level of understanding. In this way, scientific language has escaped from the realm of "natural language." This is the fate of "any language taught only by adults to adults - or to children as if they were adults. ...It serves in the end primarily to separate those who know it from those who do not." Since then, linguists and anthropologists have been reinforcing the point that the cure cannot come from simple "translation" but may lie in recognizing that a difference in languages reflects a difference in world views. Without making the mutual accommodation of these views a prominent part of the agenda, science teaching probably has to remain superficial. I refer here to the work of R. Horton on African traditional thought and Western science, and of J. Jones in... New Guinea; both... have studied the ways in which the traditional cultures of the new learners differ from the scientific cultures of the teachers, and how and to what limited degree these differences can be decreased."

"Functional discourse ... serves as a vehicle of coordination and subordination. The unified, functional language is an irreconcilably anti-critical and anti-dialectical language. In it, operational and behavioral rationality absorbs the transcendent, negative, oppositional elements of Reason."

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

"In the natural sciences, language (mathematics) is a useful tool: like the microscope or telescope, it enables us to see what is otherwise invisible. In the social sciences, language (literalized metaphor) is an impediment: like a distorting mirror, it prevents us from seeing the obvious. That is why in the natural sciences, knowledge can be gained only with the mastery of their special languages; whereas in human affairs, knowledge can be gained only by rejecting the pretentious jargons of the social sciences."

"Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world."

"Translation is at best an echo."

"Translation of poetry into poetry is difficult, because the translator must give a brilliancy to his language without that warmth of original conception, from which such brilliancy would follow of its own accord."

"I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention and expedient, the more likely he is to be betrayed into the widest departures from the guide whom he professes to follow."

"Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate, That few but such as cannot write, translate."

"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ Attempt translation."

"I conceive it is a vulgar error in translating poets, to affect being fidus interpres... [for] poetry is of so subtile a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a caput mortuum, there being certain graces and happinesses peculiar to every language, which give life and energy to the words... therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this nation, but as [a] man of this age."

"No man is capable of translating poetry, who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and as it were individuate him from all other writers. When we are come thus far it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance."

"A good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body."

"Many things which go under my name are badly translated from the German or are invented by other people."

"You've often heard me say – perhaps too often – that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more."

"When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look at the translation as an act of violence against itself. To translate a foreign writer is to add to your own national poetry; such a widening of the horizon does not please those who profit from it, at least not in the beginning."

"A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him."

"I felt that by translating, first of all, I made something accessible that was inaccessible and would remain inaccessible. And in some cases, it actually inspired other people to learn Yiddish, by reading the -- then they said, I want to read the original and I want to read more. What's not translated?...it's not like the real thing. It never is. But it's either you get this, or you get nothing. And I feel that a good translation -- it's not the original -- gives you a lot...I wish more stuff was available in English. I mean, I wish I could put stuff in my classroom. But I can't, unless it's translated. And then, that means that students remain ignorant of it."

"Words are living things, full of shades of meaning, full of associations; and, what is more, they are apt to change their significance from one generation to the next. The translator who understands his job feels, constantly, like Alice in Wonderland trying to play croquet with flamingoes for mallets and hedgehogs for balls; words are for ever eluding his grasp."

"-->* ...The literal translation, that is, of absolute fidelity to the literary form in which, within his language, the author expressed his thought, betrays and kills the translated work. The good translator must say (...) the same thing (...) but within the translator's language (...) only then will he really be translating what matters: the idea, the author's thought. Who seeks to translate the form (...) does not do translation. He does a horrible thing called transliteration (...) unintelligible..."

"Literal translation of poetry is in reality a solecism. You may construe your author, indeed, but if with some Translators you boast that you have left your author to speak for himself, that you have neither added nor diminished, you have in reality grossly abused him, and deceived yourself. Your literal translation can have no claim to the original felicities of expression; the energy, elegance, and fire of the original poetry. It may bear indeed a resemblance, but such a one as a corps in the sepulchre bears to the former man when he moved in the bloom and vigour of life.Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres——was the taste of the Augustan age. None but a poet can translate a poet."

"It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator. ... And the original is in the hands of the world."

"It is frustrating to be translating other people's autobiographies whilst mine is lying unpublished, banned by the Home Office."

"Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing."

"I think people who work on translation projects think that they're somehow peace negotiators because the belief is that we'll never stop killing one another until we understand and see one another as human beings. I think that's true."

"Translations [into the German language], even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. ... The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue."

"In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question."

"Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation."

"On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator’s style."

"Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible."

"There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"In translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and differentia of the translator."

"The translator of a poem is only a transient mediator... in time all translations fall away, fade, become literary curiosities, time-bound and largely of scholarly rather than literary interest."

"That translation is the best which comes nearest to giving its modern audience the same effect as the original had on its first audiences. Just to illustrate that, may I use a rather crude example from modern French? French novelists often represent married couples as calling each other mon chou, which I don't think would strike a Frenchman as funny at all. If you translate that into English by the words, 'my cabbage,' you're going as far as possible as you can from the principle of equivalent effect. In fact, you're making the English reader think that Frenchmen are silly, which is the last thing that you should do. [...] The word [paraphrase] is much misused, by the way; it is often used as a term of abuse for very good translation. I should put it in this way, that it is permissible only where literal translation is liable to obscure the original meaning. I would go further and say that on such occasions it is not only permissible, but it is imperative, and therefore it becomes good translation, and the word 'paraphrase' should disappear."

"Translation, I believe, is about interaction, interaction between one language and another, between one form of writing and another. It is the most optimistic of literary endeavours, because it suggests that everything may be transposed, and once transposed, comprehensible...The process of translation, of moving from one language to another, closely mirrors my own experience as a writer, driven from one country to another and from one language to another. I am so grateful to translators, to all translators, for making the literature of the world available to me and to all the peoples of the world, no matter what language they speak, because I do still believe that literature is the primary way in which we may come to understand one another. When translators sit down to their work, they are engaged in more than a mere transposing of thoughts and phrases from one language into another. Sometimes, as in the case of Yiddish, there is much more at stake: it is not merely that translation allows literary works to exist in languages in which they never existed before, but also that translators are engaged in snatching from the jaws of oblivion that which is in danger of disappearing. It is a most honourable calling; it is a preservation of the past in the present. I thank all translators for the fact that they exist and have devoted their lives to breaking down the barriers between peoples and alleviating the curse of the Tower of Babel."

"A translation must speak for itself. As a rule, it only requires a commentary where it is not directly convincing, and where the translator does not feel secure."

"Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

"A scribe who does not know how to grasp the meaning -- from where will he produce a translation?"

"For Pound, translation opens up possibilities for creating a new compound out of old elements; for Nabokov it is a grudgingly admitted, inevitable evil."

"Traduzo, sim, mas fico cheia de mêdo de ler traduções que fazem de livros meus. Além de ter basntante enjôo de reler coisas minhas, fico também com mêdo do que o tradutor possa ter feito com um texto meu."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"How shall men meditate in that which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknown tongue? [...] Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water."

"The difficulties of interpretation were pointed out by Yāska in his Nirukta nearly 3,000 years ago: Sanskrit: tat ko vṛtraḥ?—meghaḥ iti nairuktāḥ, tvāṣṭro ‘suraḥ ity aitihāsikāḥ (Nirukta 2.16) English: “That (who) Vṛtra?”—“A cloud” says the narrator, “An asura, Tvaṣṭri’s [son]” say the story-tellers."

"A scholarship liked myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril."

"The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilisation of our species. Every improvement of the mean of locomotions benefits mankind mortally AND intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitated the interchange of the various productions of mature and artist, but rends to removed nationals and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the human family."

"In the placed I go there are things that I see That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z. I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!"

"Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter!"

"By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s."

"Ἐγὼ τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ, ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ὁ ἔσχατος, ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος."

"Vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favourite of “the general reader.” For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go “too far.” Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that “his errors are to be deplored,” leaving us not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapoury phrase above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views—nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements: say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply “Exactly.” He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against a clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought—a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the utmost liberty of private haziness."

"My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a domain that has not been studied so far and which should be the result of work for many generations of linguists. The reader is therefore requested to consider this book a simple introduction to the science which I propose to call semantics."

"[ Semantics can be defined as] the science of the meanings of words, [the central issue of which is] the problem of the relationship between words and designata."

"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."

"Who Are the Semanticists? To answer this question, let us go to the writings of those who make frequent references to semantics or to equivalent terms which have to do with the study of meaning. We find that a number of prominent thinkers have occupied themselves with this study. In England these include Whitehead, Russell, Ogden, Richards, Ayer, and others; in Austria (later scattered, fleeing from fascism), a group of writers who called themselves the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap and Frank (now in in the United States), Wittgenstein (now in England), and Neurath (deceased); the United States is represented by Charles Morris, and Poland by Tarski and Korzybski (deceased), both of whom emigrated to the United States."

""What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved."

"Semantics (semasiology) is a branch of linguistics. The questions which are of particular interest in this connection are — with what is that branch of linguistics concerned, and in what does it see the distinction between itself and the semantic problems found in contemporary logic."

"It was Thomas Hobbes who, anticipating semantics, pointed out that words are counters, not coins; that the wise man looks through them to reality."

"i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

"Yes is the answer and you know that for sure. Yes is surrender, you got to let it, you got to let it go…"

"Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."

"Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen."

"After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun."

"Those that say yes are rewarded by the adventure they have. Those that say no are rewarded by the safety they attain."

"While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction."

"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time"

"Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain, that we may leave some impress of ourselves on the sands of time."

"The messenger gave heed to the words of his king. He journeyed by the starry night, and by day he travelled with Utu of heaven. Where and to whom will he carry the important message of Inana with its stinging tone? ... He stepped joyfully into the courtyard of Aratta, he made known the authority of his king. Openly he spoke out the words in his heart. The messenger transmitted the message to the lord of Aratta."

"His speech was substantial, and its contents extensive. The messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the message like a tablet. It was just like that."

"My life is my message."

"My songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls."

"Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty."

"Man is a messenger who forgot the message."

"The medium is the message."

"The "message" of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs"

"The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance."

"The user of the electric light -- or a hammer, or a language, or a book -- is the content. As such, there is a total metamorphosis of the user by the interface. It is the metamorphosis that I consider the message."

"Be my witness, O God, that I conveyed your message to your people."

"A message is given to many, but those who are meant to understand, understand."

"…the truths of Christianity are constant, unchanging, and meant for all people, times, and places. But the methods by which truth is articulated and practiced must be culturally appropriated, and therefore constantly translated …if doctrine is constant and practice is constantly changing, the result is living orthodoxy."

"To be entirely against taking anything from another culture would be to condemn everything to memoir — and of all the genres of literature, I think memoir deserves the reputation for being the least true. It’s awkward to recognize that “Madame Bovary” couldn’t be better written by a French housewife. Flaubert himself identified with Emma just enough. RZA (who with his friends referred to Staten Island as “Shaolin”) saw himself, just enough, in tales of underground kung fu rebellion leaders. But most of us instinctively have more faith in what someone outside the center of power has to say; what of this instinct is legitimate, and what of it is too blunt? We remember that it was a gay, bourgeois Jew who best portrayed the French aristocracy, and not the reverse. Even though we also know that Tolstoy, from his family estate, could write any character, from peasants to princes. In the case of Wu-Tang Clan, the distribution of power between the culture they came from and the culture they borrowed from is usefully unclear."

"The “exchange” in cultural exchange suggests you give something in return for having taken something. If it’s culture that’s taken, then presumably what’s given back is the art. In which case the difference between appropriation and exchange, to be (maybe absurdly) logical about it, would have to lie with an assessment of the value of the art itself. Of course we can’t really quantify the value of what is taken or the value of the art, but that would be the logic. The more you take, the more you have to give back — the better the work has to be. Maybe when we say it’s wrong to take something, we really mean, What you’ve given back is far too poor, too mediocre — it’s bad art. I’ve never heard anyone accuse the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan of appropriating Chinese culture. This may be because I haven’t talked to enough people. But maybe it is because the music that came from a group of hip-hop kids from Staten Island who watched a lot of kung fu movies in trips to Times Square was that good."

"The [western] intellectual property rights system and the (mis)appropriation of Indigenous knowledge without the prior knowledge and consent of Indigenous peoples evoke feelings of anger, or being cheated."

"But what is cultural appropriation and exchange? Would it have made a difference if the traveler’s kaffiyeh had been manufactured and purchased in, say, Kuwait City, instead of an Urban Outfitters store in Toronto? Determining such a distinction is also, as with so many things, dependent on intent. Appropriations are expressions of ignorance or aggression, when objects, ideas, lived experiences or points of view are not so much examined as exploited and performed. Exchanges, conversely, suggest a certain sort of generosity, an openness to discussion and an invitation to reciprocity."

"The problem is, as with most everything, there’s a certain subjectivity to the entire affair. Intent can be difficult to discern, and it’s certainly not quantifiable in any precise way. But what I do know is that underlying the idea of appropriation is the sense that something — or someone — is just there for the taking: A style of dress, a personal narrative, an entire continent. You can’t always prove appropriation. But you usually know it when you see it."

"'Dressing up as "another culture", is racist, and an act of privilege. Not only does it lead to offensive, inaccurate, and stereotypical portrayals of other people's culture ... but is also an act of appropriation in which someone who does not experience that oppression is able to "play", temporarily, an "exotic" other, without experience any of the daily discriminations faced by other cultures.'"

"One need not look far to see that Hollywood often fails to provide both representation of, and employment to, members of marginalized communities. Movements like #OscarsSoWhite, and continued pushback against cisgender actors playing trans roles, have been increasingly covered in media the past few years. Yet the Gay for Pay Problem has not had the same attention, at least in the recent past, as other ways that Hollywood is willing to tell stories from marginalized groups without hiring marginalized people."

"We assert a posture of zero-tolerance for any "white man's shaman" who rises from within our own communities to "authorize" the expropriation of our ceremonial ways by non-Indians; all such "plastic medicine men" are enemies of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people."

"Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It is most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects."

"What happens further in the Plastic Shaman's [fictitious] story is highly irritating from a perspective of cultural hegemony. The Injun elder does not only willingly share their spirituality with the white intruder but, in fact, must come to the conclusion that this intruder is as good an Indian as they are themselves. Regarding Indian spirituality, the Plastic Shaman even out-Indians the actual ones. The messianic element, which Plastic Shamanism financially draws on, is installed in the Yoda-like elder themselves. They are the ones – while melodramatically parting from their spiritual offshoot – who urge the Plastic Shaman to share their gift with the rest of the world. Thus Plastic Shamans wipe their hands clean of any megalomaniac or missionizing undertones. Licensed by the authority of an Indian elder, they now have every right to spread their wisdom, and if they make (quite more than) a buck with it, then so be it.—The neocolonial ideology attached to this scenario leaves less room for cynicism."

"Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures, including human and genetic resources, seeds, medicines, knowledge of the properties of fauna and flora, oral traditions, literatures, designs, sports and traditional games and visual and performing arts. They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions."

"Insults have broken my heart and left me weak"

"Who needs a heart, when a heart can be broken?"

"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. [...] Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the Sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

"Doch ein gekränktes Herz erholt sich schwer."

"I’ve climbed up here holding the hilt of time’s sword after driving it into my tender heart."

"Whether anybody comes to convince me or not, a part of my life does always ache arresting my chest."

"My heart didn't want to believe it, but the truth was right in front of me."

"Never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break."

"I'll break your heart to keep you far from where all danger starts"

"May Inana pour oil on my heart that aches."

"Jules Winnfield: What ain't no country I've ever heard of, do they speak English in What?"

"The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect."

"La propagande de l'erreur est libre: liberté de pensée!"

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought."

"“The biggest gift from God to man is a free mind,” [Uyghur-man Örkesh Davlet] said."

"The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control over the means of mental production, so that in consequence the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are, in general, subject to it."

"If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era."

"But arms – instrumentalities, as President Wilson called them – are not sufficient by themselves. We must add to them the power of ideas. People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like – they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home – all the more powerful because forbidden – terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?"

"Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own. In the "unsteepled" places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments with "members unlimited". Against the background of London Dissent, with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time. On the contrary, he is the original yet authentic voice of a long popular tradition. If some of the London Jacobins were strangely unperturbed by the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette it was because they remembered that their own forebears had once executed a king. No one with Bunyan in their bones could have found many of Blake's aphorisms strange: "The strongest poison ever known \ Game from Caesar's laurel crown.""

"Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution or sanity or reasoned scepticism or on occasion even as courage."

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."

"I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven."

"In a certain sense lexicography may be considered a superior discipline to lexicology, for results are more important than intentions and the value of theoretical principles must be estimated according to results."

"Editing a dictionary isn’t like editing any other book or magazine," the professor pointed out. "It’s a peculiar world. You need extreme patience, a capacity for endless minutiae, a love of words bordering on obsession, and a broad enough outlook to stay sane. What makes you think there are any young people like that nowadays?"