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.

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

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

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

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

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

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

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

What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.

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. 

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

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

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.