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.
—Orson Welles, 1953Quotes
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.
—John Locke, 1690Language 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, 1817Methinks 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, 1899Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCNewspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915Only 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.
—E.M. Forster, 1910Words pay no debts.
—William Shakespeare, 1601Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?
—Dong Zhongshu, c. 120 BCIn the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.
—Voltaire, 1764Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.
—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732What a glut of books! Who can read them? As already, we shall have a vast chaos and confusion of books; we are oppressed with them, our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.
—Robert Burton, 1621