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Quotes

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.

—Thomas Carlyle, 1838

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.

—Virginia Woolf, 1899

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.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843

Words pay no debts.

—William Shakespeare, 1601

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1921

Language 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, 1817

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

—Voltaire, c. 1732

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.

—Samuel Johnson, 1780

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

—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

—Bertrand Russell, 1961

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

—George Orwell, 1944

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844

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

—Marcel Marceau, 1958