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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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. 

Slang is as old as speech and the congregating together of people in cities. It is the result of crowding and excitement and artificial life.

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.

Language is the archives of history.

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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