Anyone who doesn’t know foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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

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

The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms.

Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Language is the archives of history.

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.