It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
—Thomas Hardy, 1874Quotes
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
—Orson Welles, 1953Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?
—Voltaire, c. 1732Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
—Carl Sandburg, 1959Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BCWords pay no debts.
—William Shakespeare, 1601Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCThe only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They indeed are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.
—Samuel Johnson, 1780Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.
—E.M. Forster, 1910Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821