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

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.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

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

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

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

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

Under all speech that is good for anything, there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.

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

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

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.