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

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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. 

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

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.