The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is an language I do not understand.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

No language is rude that can boast polite writers.

The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.

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.

And who in time knows whither we may vent the treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores this gain of our best glories shall be sent, 't unknowing Nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident may come refined with the accents that are ours?

The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.

Male supremacy is fused into the language, so that every sentence both heralds and affirms it.

The words of language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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

The language of truth is simple.

Words are the leaves of the tree of language, of which, if some fall away, a new succession takes their place.

Those who know nothing of foreign languages, knows nothing of their own.

Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language. Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Language is the pedigree of nations.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Language is the inventory of human experience.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

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.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy and its full charm is possible only to the gentle.

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.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his/her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

The universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to express the things of the mind and spirit. The order of ideas must follow the order of things.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests

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.

Numbers constitute the only universal language.

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.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.