Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

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

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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.

Language is the archives of history.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

Methinks 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.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

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.

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.

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.