Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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

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

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

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.

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

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