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.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

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

Every 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.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.