"The more you study, the more you know. The more you know, the more you forget. The more you forget, the less you know. The less you know, the more you study."

"Never cast a clout till May be out."

"Never judge a book by its cover."

"Never wear a brown hat in Friesland."

"We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language."

"The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language."

"[...] you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids [...], and no more legitimate than any of the other results."

"In the English language, if we want to speak of that sugar maple or that salamander, the only grammar that we have to do so is to call those beings an “it.” And if I called my grandmother or the person sitting across the room from me an “it,” that would be so rude, right? And we wouldn’t tolerate that for members of our own species, but we not only tolerate it, but it’s the only way we have in the English language to speak of other beings, is as “it.” In Potawatomi, the cases that we have are animate and inanimate, and it is impossible in our language to speak of other living beings as “its”...the language of “it,” which distances, disrespects, and objectifies, I can’t help but think is at the root of a worldview that allows us to exploit nature."

"It is a misfortune for Anglo-American friendship that the two countries are supposed to have a common language. A Frenchman in America is not expected to talk like an American, but an Englishman speaking his mother tongue is thought to be affected and giving himself airs. Or else he is taken for a German or a Dutchman, and is complimented on his grammatical mastery of the language of another nation."

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

"I say looking at the next 100 years that there are two trends in the world today. The first trend is toward what we call a type one civilization, a planetary civilization... What is English? English is the beginning of a type one language. Everywhere I go around the Earth, people speak English because that is the lingua franca of science, technology, business. They all speak English. It is the number one second language on the planet Earth."

"Fussing about split infinitives is one of the more tiresome pastimes invented by nineteenth-century grammarians."

"[A speaker who uses a multiple negative] spreads as it were a thin layer of negative colouring over the whole sentence instead of confining it to a single place."