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.
—John Camden Hotten, 1859Quotes
Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
—Marcel Marceau, 1958Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Information 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.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.
—Winston Churchill, 1943Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCMethinks 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.
—Virginia Woolf, 1899Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1821Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.
—The Book of Changes, c. 350 BCThe 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.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840