Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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

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.

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

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

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

In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

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.

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

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

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