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.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

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

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

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

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.

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.

How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.

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

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

In the case of news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

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.