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

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

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.

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Man is the one name belonging to every nation upon earth: there is one soul and many tongues, one spirit and various sounds; every country has its own speech, but the subjects of speech are common to all.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

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

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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.