Archive

Quotes

Speak and speed; the close mouth catches no flies.

—Benjamin Franklin, c. 1732

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

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

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

—Charles Lamb, 1833

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

—Marcel Marceau, 1958

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

—Jane Austen, 1818

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

—Galen, c. 175

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

—George Orwell, 1944

I live by good soup, and not on fine language.

—Molière, 1672

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

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1915

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

—E.M. Forster, 1910

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