History Of Language Quotes

#1. To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

Mary Ellen Chase

#2. In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake.
Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

James Reston Jr.

#3. All of the Great Teachers throughout the history of our species have merely taught one thing, over & over, in whatever language, at whatever time. All have said, simply: Give up weak attractors for strong attractors.

David Hawkins

#4. Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Octavio Paz

#5. I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.

Donna Tartt

#6. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

James P. Carse

#7. There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

Owen Barfield

#8. That one of history's greatest brains struggled with amo, amas, amat should be consolation to anyone who has ever tried to learn a second language.

Ross King

#9. Language is the most extraordinary invention in the history of humanity, the one which came before everything and which makes it possible to share everything.

J.M.G. Le Clezio

#10. The point of this language of "intention" and "personal responsibility" is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#11. Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Douglas Adams

#12. Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#13. A translation needs to read convincingly. There's no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.

Jonathan Galassi

#14. The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.

Christine Kenneally

#15. English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.

Alexis Wright

#16. A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.

Laila Lalami

#17. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.

Mo Yan

#18. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

#19. Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

Daniel O'Connell

#20. It always trips me out that America, the most powerful and magnificent nation in the history of the world, whose might was built by immigrants from all over the world, only speaks one language.

Cheech Marin

#21. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.

Mary Kubica

#22. What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.

James Elkins

#23. A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Gore Vidal

#24. Name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world.

Laila Lalami

#25. One. Word.
NO.
No is a powerful word. To me, it's the single most powerful word in the English language. Said clearly, strongly and with enough frequency and force, it can alter the course of history.

Shonda Rhimes

#26. Language is an archaeological vehicle ... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Russell Hoban

#27. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Pat Conroy

#28. Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away.

Arthur F. Holmes

#29. Language and History in Viking Age England: Language Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnbout, 2002).

F. Donald Logan

#30. English language is the most universal language in history, way more than the Latin of Julius Caesar. It's the most punderful language because its vocabulary has a certain critical mass that makes a lingo good for punning.

Richard Lederer

#31. Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel.

Rick Strassman

#32. It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

Brian Friel

#33. At the root of this failure of intelligence was "our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language," he said.

Tim Weiner

#34. Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

George Orwell

#35. The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us.

Alan Moore

#36. To write about history or language is supposed to be within the reach of every man. To write about natural science is allowed to be within the reach only of those who have mastered the subjects on which they write.

Edward Augustus Freeman

#37. But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Thomas Lynch

#38. The use of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural history: the use of the outer creation, to give us language for the beings and changes of the inward creation.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#39. Every drop of human blood contains a history book written in the language of our genes.

Spencer Wells

#40. The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

Antonio Gramsci

#41. The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely a single language family. The implications of such a classification for the origin and history of our species would, of course, be very great.

Joseph H. Greenberg

#42. A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Noam Chomsky

#43. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.

Audre Lorde

#44. Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information.

Betty Edwards

#45. I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

Michel Foucault

#46. We have our own history, our own language, our own culture. But our destiny is also tied up with the destinies of other people - history has made us all South Africans.

Mangosuthu Buthelezi

#47. Between France and Senegal there's a history. There's a language that we both speak. There's a culture that we share and to which both of our peoples have contributed. But beyond our history, beyond our language, beyond the links that have united us for so long, what unites us today is the future.

Francois Hollande

#48. Be careful. I wouldn't want anything to happen to the worst Spanish student in the history of the language."
I laughed. "No problemo.

Kiersten White

#49. The only way to defend language is to attack it ... ' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

Alain De Botton

#50. The two ethnic groups that remain fundamentally different from the Han Chinese - in terms of history, culture, language, religion and physical appearance - are the Uighurs and Tibetans. In these two groups, the Han Chinese come face to face with difference.

Martin Jacques

#51. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Diane Wakoski

#52. Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

David Cronenberg

#53. The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.

David Graeber

#54. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt

#55. Leave No Trace (bad language)
Sometimes she will speak of him as present, sometimes as past, and sometimes as always. That is how it should be. No one needs rescuing from her own story of the truth and no one needs to side step her history. p270

Hannah Nyala

#56. ... since the history of words is a mainspring of our intellectual and emotional character.

Cirilo F. Bautista

#57. Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

Slobodan Milosevic

#58. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.

Jane Hirshfield

#59. The strong belief that the interests of a particular nation-state are of primary importance. Also, the belief that a people who share a common language, history, and culture should constitute an independent nation, free of foreign domination.

Ernest Gellner

#60. A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.

Robert Payne

#61. Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book .

R.S. Thomas

#62. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

Theodore Bikel

#63. All over the world today, not just in the totalitarian countries, assiduous functionaries in Ministries of Truth are clubbing history dumb and rendering language insensible.

E.L. Doctorow

#64. If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

A.A. Milne

#65. I have seen how effective language attached to policies that are mainstream and delivered by people who are passionate and effective can change the course of history.

Frank Luntz

#66. Even if someone knew the entire physical history of the world, and every mental event were identical with a physical, it would notfollow that he could predict or explain a single mental event (so described, of course).

Donald Davidson

#67. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.

Tommy Lapid

#68. Poetry is the elder sister of history, the mother of language, the ancestress of civilization.

Orson F. Whitney

#69. What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Steven Pinker

#70. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.

Polykarp Kusch

#71. Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power.

Martin Prochazka

#72. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.

Daniel Walker Howe

#73. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

David Crystal

#74. Language is the archives of history.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#75. He wished someone in the course of history had thought of striking that word and all its derivatives from the English Language - happy, happier, happiest, happiness. What the devil did the words really mean anyway? Why not just the word pleasure, which was far more ... well, pleasant.

Mary Balogh

#76. I think the language of sacrifice is particularly important for societies like the United States in which war remains our most determinative common experience, because states like the United States depend on the story of our wars for our ability to narrate our history as a unified story.

Stanley Hauerwas

#77. I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town whichwas appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#78. Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.
It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:
The history of how you felt.

Simon Van Booy

#79. The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.

Abigail Solomon-Godeau

#80. I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it's 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world.

Geoff Ryman

#81. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.

Mary Ruefle

#82. I've made a dog's breakfast of English history, geography, 'King Lear,' and the English language in general.

Christopher Moore

#83. Only the language of civilized people may be spoken, thus no German.

Anne Frank

#84. As there was no form of government common to the peoples thus segregated, nor tie of language, history, habit or belief, they were called a Republic.

Evelyn Waugh

#85. 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

#86. Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.

Jules Michelet

#87. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt - above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

David Graeber

#88. History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.

Terence McKenna

#89. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa.

Yuval Noah Harari

#90. The number of interrogators who have been bamboozled since the dawn of history by the body language and appealing manner of pretty prisoners is, to be precise, 43,123,465; in the time it has taken to write this sentence, that number has increased by 314.

William R. Johnson

#91. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.

William Jones

#92. History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#93. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.

Minae Mizumura