American Language Quotes

#1. And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies.

Dan Bern

#2. I got my dog back, in African-American language, your dog means your passion, your fire.

Deion Sanders

#3. The official language of the State of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language, and not the English language.

Frank Church

#4. If you loose the sounds comming out of New Orleans, you loose apart of the american language.

Ty Pennington

#5. American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

Henry Adams

#6. The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

Cyril Connolly

#7. The American language differs from the English in that it seeks the top of expression while English seeks its lowly valleys.

Salvador De Madariaga

#8. The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

James F. Cooper

#9. It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest ...

Jan Morris

#10. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.

Alan Siegel

#11. 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.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#12. I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Christopher Hitchens

#13. The way I mainly use the Internet is keeping in touch with poets that live far away. My main interest is contemporary American poets and some Spanish language poets, and I keep in touch with their work through either their websites or email.

John Burnside

#14. I believe we are being dishonest with language minority groups if we tell them they can take full part in American life without learning the English language.

S.I. Hayakawa

#15. Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included.

Santino Hassell

#16. Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made this century, to the proposition that" - he had gone formal, but now he reverted to plain language - "race has no place in American life or law.

Ken Follett

#17. He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.

Robert M. Pirsig

#18. You know I very much respect Yvonne Rainer, she is very important - in American dance, the entire development of modern dance, and creating a wonderful physical language.

Marina Abramovic

#19. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.

John McWhorter

#20. I speak Swedish, it's my first language. Of course, growing up with Latin American parents from Argentina, I also have some other influences from other cultures. But Sweden is where I feel the most at home.

Jose Gonzalez

#21. They (Americans) have their national game, baseball - which is cricket played with a strong American accent - and they have a national language, entirely their own, unlike any other language spoken on the earth.

George Mikes

#22. Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;

Barry Eisler

#23. There is a core simplicity to the English language and its American variant, but it's a slippery core.

Stephen King

#24. Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.

Thad Cochran

#25. If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

Anthony Trollope

#26. Cormac McCarthy's language is perfect. He is in my view the greatest living American prose stylist.

Tommy Lee Jones

#27. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.

Michiel Huisman

#28. Psychologically, Japanese women depend largely on each other. In their sex-segregated society, they could be criticized for living in a female ghetto, and yet they have what some American feminists are trying to build, a "women's culture" with its own customs, values and even language.

Kittredge Cherry

#29. Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.

Rita Mae Brown

#30. I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

Lee Van Cleef

#31. Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

Mignon McLaughlin

#32. Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.

Andrzej Wajda

#33. The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of

William Carlos Williams

#34. First of all, the novel should be a critique of the novels that have come before it in a language that broadens the audience of American literature. Second, it's really got to be invested in a number of what-if questions.

Kiese Laymon

#35. I remind my American readers that biscuits in England and Australia are crispy flat things such as you call cookies, and the soft doughy things you call biscuits are what we call scones. And they say we speak the same language ...

Kerry Greenwood

#36. In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.

Robert Burchfield

#37. If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

John Mellencamp

#38. My family are from Liverpool, so I have some twang there - I have a Midlands accent, and I was raised about an hour north of London, so my voice is a mess. Although, to American ears, it sounds like the crisp language of a queen's butler.

John Oliver

#39. I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.

John Pilger

#40. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

Jess Row

#41. Right before 'American Dreams,' I started to pursue these avenues, like short films and getting into a couple night courses to really study photography and cinematography, and the language of visual storytelling.

Tom Verica

#42. I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.

Emmanuelle Beart

#43. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.

Rashers Tierney

#44. I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing ... is a lack of craftsmanship. It comes right down to this - the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.

Harper Lee

#45. I definitely wish to distinguish American poetry from British or other English language poetry.

Diane Wakoski

#46. The English love for privacy is proverbial, and has not been exaggerated. A stranger who strikes up a conversation is looked upon with suspicion - unless he happens to be an American, when his ignorance of good manners is indulged.

Henry Steele Commager

#47. The "coffee break" - as a phrase and concept - was invented in 1952 by the Pan American Coffee Bureau. It quickly became a part of the language, as

Mark Pendergrast

#48. Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

Peter Farb

#49. When the American people look at the political process play out, they hear all the spinning and all the doctrinaire language, and they still walk away with the belief that they're not being represented in Congress, that there's no trust in the executive branch.

David Gregory

#50. Nat played away and never minded anyone, while his eyes shone, his cheeks reddened, and his thin fingers flew, as he hugged the old fiddle and made it speak to all their hearts the language that he loved.

Louisa May Alcott

#51. The American Club was for those who preferred to have dinner at six and brunch on a Sunday and avoid the stress of dealing with Greeks and their language.

John Mole

#52. I think foreign countries really do like it when American artists sing in their language. And when you go over there and say, 'Hi, how are you?' in their language, they love it. It makes them feel like you're doing it just for them. We in America take so much for granted.

Natalie Cole

#53. Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.

Jesse Jackson

#54. I think it's important if you're American to have a second language, and Spanish is the language to have.

Thalia

#55. They're on their way to the foreign-language wing. That's no surprise. The foreign kids are always here, like they need to breathe air scented with their native language a couple times a day or they'll choke to death on too much American.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#56. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

S.I. Hayakawa

#57. The American Indian, once proud and free, is torn now between White and tribal values; between the politics and language of the White man and his own historic culture. His problems, sharpened by years of defeat and exploitation, neglect and inadequate effort, will take many years to overcome.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#58. Far from being dominated by ideas from Paris and New York, Latin American artists were often the innovators. They were doing drip paintings in advance of Pollock, creating language art before the American conceptualists, and fashioning shaped canvases decades before Kelly or Stella.

Mari Carmen Ramirez

#59. But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.

Rod Dreher

#60. Most American and European scholars believe that the Chinese speak their languages, only that they "talk" in Chinese.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#61. Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art' ... For Indians, everything is art ... therefore needs no name.

Jamake Highwater

#62. I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

David Mamet

#63. Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

Tanit Phoenix

#64. I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.

Alice McDermott

#65. That these are our grievances which we have thus laid before his majesty, with that freedom of language and sentiment which becomes a free people claiming their rights as derived from the laws of nature, and not as the gift of their chief magistrate.

Thomas Jefferson

#66. We have to make movies where we do not think this is for the American market or this is for the Chinese market. We have to make a good movie that anyone would just want to sit down and watch because love, language, culture transcend everything.

Michelle Yeoh

#67. We have room but for one Language here and that is the English Language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans of American nationality and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding-house.

Theodore Roosevelt

#68. To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

#69. I used to watch a lot of American and British television as a child, which helped teach me the language and accents; it was partly that which landed me the part of Roxy in a London production of 'Chicago' when I was 25.

Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

#70. As we embrace the American dream and the freedoms it represents, we must also ensure that those who wish to enjoy those freedoms become a part of our society and learn to speak our language.

Bobby Jindal

#71. After I arrived in Mountain View, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, I entered sixth grade and quickly grew to love my new home, family and culture. I discovered a passion for language, though it was hard to learn the difference between formal English and American slang.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#72. I do love to interpret songs in American Sign Language.

Sean Berdy

#73. The English Language Amendment says above all, 'Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English. Let us not deny them the opportunity to participate in American life, so that they can go as far as their dreams and talents can take them.

S.I. Hayakawa

#74. I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much.

Haruki Murakami

#75. In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

Stephen Burt

#76. When the American Spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different; Liberty, sir, was then the primary object.

Patrick Henry

#77. When the American people get through with the English language, it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.

Finley Peter Dunne

#78. can you be a daughter.
if you have no
mother language."
- african american iii

Nayyirah Waheed

#79. And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people, it's an intimate medium of television, and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

Margaret Spellings

#80. However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow.

Walter Kirn

#81. With some exceptions in science fiction and other genres I have small difficulty in avoiding anything that could be called American literature. I feel it is unnatural, not I think entirely because it uses a language that is not mine, however closely akin to my own.

Kingsley Amis

#82. When he spoke of love, it was in the manner of someone who can recite a phrase in a foreign language but has no idea what it means. He only knows that it sounds pretty.

Roy L. Pickering Jr.

#83. Our parents taught us to love God, love our family and love our country. Their own grandparents were immigrants. Their first language may not have been English, but the hopes and dreams they had for their children were purely American.

Martin O'Malley

#84. Paris? People always say Paris is the shit. "Yes, I've never understood the American obsession with that city. The food is actually quite terrible on the whole, and the people can be rather awful if you don't speak the language.

Tommy Wallach

#85. I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

Eiza Gonzalez

#86. There's a specificity of language that's required in Shakespeare that most drama students in England deal with - a specificity of language that is somehow not as clear in a lot of American schools.

James Avery

#87. The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth

Rudyard Kipling

#88. I lived for a year in Scotland. British sign language is very different from American.

I. King Jordan

#89. In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.

Richard Rodriguez

#90. My new play 'Chinglish,' which will go to Broadway, is about a white American businessman who goes to a provincial capital in China, hoping to make a deal there. It's bilingual. And it's about trying to communicate across language and cultural barriers.

David Henry Hwang

#91. When a Japanese manufacturer was asked by his North American counterpart, What is the best language in which to do business?" the man responded: "My customer's language

Leonard Sweet

#92. The American constitutions were to liberty, what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax

Thomas Paine

#93. We are all American. If we believe that we are Americans, if we believe that what binds us together is what we have in common, then it must include the common language, and that common tongue is English.

Ernest Istook

#94. When I went to college, I majored in American literature, which was unusual then. But it meant that I was broadly exposed to nineteenth-century American literature. I became interested in the way that American writers used metaphoric language, starting with Emerson.

Marilynne Robinson

#95. I love the English language just like I love all American things. But I confess that I don't feel confident using complex sentences or big words, hence my famous minimally expressive style - all the "gees" and laconic answers to interviewers. Most of all, I have developed listening as an art form.

Andy Warhol

#96. Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

John Lukacs

#97. There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

H.L. Mencken

#98. A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of thirty-six studies that looked at the physical growth, cognition, language and motor skills, behavior, attention, affect, and neurophysiology found no connection between prenatal exposure to cocaine and a decrease in functioning.

Cris Beam

#99. I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.

NoViolet Bulawayo

#100. No white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man's clothes, eats the white man's food, speaks the white man's language, and professes the white man's religion.

Booker T. Washington