A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961Quotes
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?
—Dong Zhongshu, c. 120 BCLanguage is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
—Karl Kraus, c. 1910The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.
—Galen, c. 175History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946Man 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.
—Tertullian, c. 217Making 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, 1962In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.
—Winston Churchill, 1943I 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.
—Orson Welles, 1953We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
—John Locke, 1690