Labov Quotes

#1. And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

William Labov

#2. An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

William Labov

#3. The swelling from the injury was so severe, it was causing enormous pressure on my brain, which if left uncontrolled would have killed me. This surgery lasted about six hours

Amy Rankin

#4. However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

William Labov

#5. Rights are either God-given or evolve out of the democratic process. Most rights are based on the ability of people to agree on a social contract, the ability to make and keep agreements.

Rush Limbaugh

#6. No one, it appears, took up his offer to commercialize his invention; like other inventions of his, it worked well for him, but mere mortals found the instructions too complicated.

Morton N. Cohen

#7. This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

#8. I have resisted the term sociolinguistics for many years, since it implies that there can be a successful linguistic theory or practice which is not social.

William Labov

#9. Common sense isn't as common as its name implies

Douglas Thompson

#10. I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.

Amos Oz

#11. Nothing is so fundamental to the spiritual life as learning to give thanks.

Gordon T. Smith

#12. As far as I'm concerned, the spiritual life is just like any other endeavor-you can succeed or fail. And when the goal is actual evolution beyond ego in an intersubjective context, success or failure is plain for all to see.

Andrew Cohen

#13. I'm sorry. (Valerius) It's okay. We all have scars. I'm just lucky most of mine are on the outside. (Tabitha)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#14. But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there.

William Labov

#15. Anytime a sage displays humanness - in regard to money, food, sex, relationships - we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.

Ken Wilber

#16. As the founder of your company, you must be in love with your brand and inspired by your brand's mission if you have any hope of getting press for your product.

Jason Calacanis

#17. once a weak person gets really frightened, they get quite savage with terror and they've no self-control at all.

Agatha Christie

#18. We focus upon pairs of words very often which are the same in some areas and different in other areas.

William Labov

#19. I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

William Labov

#20. Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And - how many of us do know it?

Philip K. Dick

#21. Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.

William Labov

#22. Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book ... an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

Scarlett Thomas

#23. Every time I find something redeeming about you the jerk side messes it up.

Mina Carter

#24. But friends invited me to a private screening of Emmanuelle and said I'd learn a few things. But I know all the swear words. I just don't use them. So I declined.

Irene Dunne