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Quotes

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

—Molière, 1672

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

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

—Arthur Miller, 1961

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

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821

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.

—John Locke, 1690

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.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843

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.

—Orson Welles, 1953

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

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.

—Albert Camus, 1957

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

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

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

—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BC

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

—Carl Sandburg, 1959