“The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.”
“The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.”
“Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.”
“I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”
“One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.”
“After all, when you come right down to it, how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?”
“Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.”
“I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.”
“The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.”
“Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.”
“The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”
“Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.”
“Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.”
“Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.”
“There is no such thing as ''the Queen's English.'' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
“When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.”
“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”
“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.”
“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
“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.”
“Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.”
“To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
“As the language of the face is universal, so 'tis very comprehensive; no laconism can reach it: 'Tis the short hand of the mind, and crowds a great deal in a little room”
“There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?”
“Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide --that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life --are alike forbidden.”
“There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
“Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.”
“Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.”