Writing cannot express words fully; words cannot express thoughts fully.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

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.

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.

Words pay no debts.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

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

Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. 

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.

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

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.

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