History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946Quotes
My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
—Karl Kraus, c. 1910I 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, 1953Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.
—Thomas Carlyle, 1838We 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.
—John Locke, 1690I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus, 1957A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961I live by good soup, and not on fine language.
—Molière, 1672Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell, 1944Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
—Carl Sandburg, 1959