I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

Language is the archives of history.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

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.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.