A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

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.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Language is the archives of history.

Man 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.

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

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

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.

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

The 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. 

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

No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

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.