Archive

Quotes

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

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.

—Robert Burton, 1621

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.

—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987

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

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

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

—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946

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.

—John Camden Hotten, 1859

God never sent a messenger save with the language of his folk, that he might make the message clear for them.

—The Qur’an, c. 620

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.

—Tertullian, c. 217

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

—Arthur Miller, 1961

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732

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

—Winston Churchill, 1943

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

Language is the archives of history.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844