2,489 Quotes About Language

Given that the shared understanding of truth has been central to language, religion and society, when we ignore small lies, we inflict damage on the larger truth.This is not holiness we’re talking about, but wholeness and integrity.

Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.

Rigorously comb through the pages of your life until you can even speak its broken dialects fluently.

[...] it seems you don’t understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you’ll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them [...]

Scared of words? I don't see why anybody ought to fear words. Words are tools;you have to know how to use them to get donethe job you want to get done. Can't do the workif you're scared of the work.

There are other reasons we use math in physics. Besides keeping us honest, math is also the most economical and unambiguous terminology that we know of. Language is malleable; it depends on context and interpretation. But math doesn’t care about culture or history. If a thousand people read a book, they read a thousand different books. But if a thousand people read an equation, they read the same equation.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion.

Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade before the public.

I want all the books on the shelves. I want the books with dinosaur words like nigger that show the skeletons in our national closet. I want books with the word cunt as well as the word kike. Words don't scare me. Suppressing them does.