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Quotes

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

—E.M. Forster, 1910

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

—Molière, 1672

Words pay no debts.

—William Shakespeare, 1601

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

—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946

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

—Samuel Johnson, 1773

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

—Arthur Miller, 1961

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

—Alfred Hitchcock, 1962

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

—Galen, c. 175

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. 

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

—Xenocrates, c. 350 BC

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.

—Robert Burton, 1621

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

—Karl Kraus, c. 1910