quotations about language
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different. Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese -- to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world -- are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.
DAVID ARBESÚ
"Could the language barrier actually fall within the next 10 years?", The Conversation, March 28, 2016
What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies. The ruthless and cynical mutilation and degradation of human beings, both in spirit and body, the death of countless thousands -- these actions are justified by rhetorical gambits, sterile terminology and concepts of power which stink. Are we ever going to look at the language we use, I wonder? Is it within our capabilities to do so?
HAROLD PINTER
"Oh, Superman", Opinion, May 31, 1990
There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"Theophile Gautier", L'art romantique
Speech, originally, was the device whereby Man learned, imperfectly, to transmit the thoughts and emotions of his mind. By setting up arbitrary sounds and combinations of sounds to represent certain mental nuances, he developed a method of communication--but one which in its clumsiness and thick-thumbed inadequacy degenerated all the delicacy of the mind into gross and guttural signaling.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Second Foundation
It may be observed, that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength.
EDMUND BURKE
Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Some languages are musical in themselves, so that it is pleasant to hear any one read or converse in them, even though we do not understand a word that we hear.... Others are full of growling, snarling, hissing sounds, as though wild beasts and serpents had first taught the people to speak.
HORACE MANN
Thoughts
To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.
NOAH WEBSTER
preface, Dictionary
Nature impelled men to make sounds with their tongues
And they found it useful to give names to things
Much for the same reason that we see children now
Have recourse to gestures because they cannot speak
And point their fingers at things which appear before them.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.
HERBERT SPENCER
The Philosophy of Style
People only speak to get something. If I say, Let me tell you a few things about myself, already your defenses go up; you go, Look, I wonder what he wants from me, because no one ever speaks except to obtain an objective. That's the only reason anyone ever opens their mouth, onstage or offstage. They may use a language that seems revealing, but if so, it's just coincidence, because what they're trying to do is accomplish an objective.
DAVID MAMET
The Paris Review, spring 1997