Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, [any] category [so] full of internal contradictions? . . . Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.