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

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.

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.

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.

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

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. 

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.

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 live by good soup, and not on fine language.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.