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.

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

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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 am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

Man 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.

Information 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.

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

It is a luxury to be understood.

Making 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?

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.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.