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

We 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

Words pay no debts.

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.