Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
—Charles Lamb, 1833Quotes
Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCA good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
—Arthur Miller, 1961Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
—Jane Austen, 1818Language 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, 1817What 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, 1621Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us all without words?
—Marcel Marceau, 1958My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.
—Karl Kraus, c. 1910Unexemplary words and unfounded doctrines are avoided by the noble person. Why utter them?
—Dong Zhongshu, c. 120 BCThe more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.
—Plato, c. 375 BCIt is impossible to translate the poets. Can you translate music?
—Voltaire, c. 1732Man 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. 217I 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