Quotations about Language

Language quotes

 "A different language is a different vision of life." Federico Fellini (January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film-maker.La Strada was chosen by the Motion Picture Academy as Best Foreign Film of 1956, La Dolce Vita (1960) won the Grand Prize at the 1961 Cannes Festival.

"The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man." G. K. Chesterton

"All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry." G. K. Chesterton, Defendant (1901) English author & mystery novelist (1874 - 1936)

"Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery." ~Mark Amidon

"Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool." ~Martin H. Fischer, The Nobel Prize Medicine in 1992

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself." ~Derek Walcott The Nobel Prize in Literature 1992

"Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true."

"Language is the dress of thought." ~Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709-13 December 1784), Author of the "Dictionary of the English Language" 1755

"Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons." ~Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) The author of the famous dystopian novel "Brave new world"

"Die Sprache eines Volkes ist seine Seele." ("The language of a people is its soul.") Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) A German philosopher who was the father of the German Idealism, his philosophical theories form a bridge between the ideas of Kant and Hegel.

"One free lunch in the world is to learn another language in early childhood." "The Language Instinct" Steven Arthur Pinker (1954-) A Canadian psychologist and cognitive scientist. He is the author of the controversial "The Language Instinct"

"Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English." ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

"A thing well said will be wit in all languages." ~John Dryden,(1631-1700) an English poet, dramaturge, essayist and librettist.

"Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." ~Ezra Pound (1885 - 1972) American poet and critic. He had a decisive influence on the twentieth century English literature. He also translated Japanese plays and Chinese poetry.

"[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."  "Politics and the English Language" ~George Orwell (1903-1950) English novelist and essayist, the famous author of 1984 and "Animal Farm", virulent pamphlets against totalitarianism of all kind.

"England and America are two countries divided by a common language." ~George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) Irish playwright, literary critic, G-B Shaw is a leading author in the 20th century theater. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 ( "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.")

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