Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?

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

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.

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.

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

Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?

It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?

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. 

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.

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.

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

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

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