A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961Quotes
What 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, 1621Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915Language is the archives of history.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Man 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.
—Tertullian, c. 217It is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?
—Voltaire, c. 1732History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946We 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, 1690I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.
—Xenocrates, c. 350 BCThe 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.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work.
—Carl Sandburg, 1959No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.
—Bertrand Russell, 1961I 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, 1953