Archive

Quotes

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

—Winston Churchill, 1943

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

The 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, 1840

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

—John Camden Hotten, 1859

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

—Robert Burton, 1621

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

—Voltaire, c. 1732

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

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

—Molière, 1672

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969