Top 100 Language Is Power Quotes
#1. Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care.
Rebecca Solnit
#2. Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
Angela Carter
#3. Language is power that gets abused all the time, Robin, but we've got real enemies out there somewhere and until they're out of the picture, I won't get knotted up over people who don't get all the words right. It's a waste of energy.
Tim Eldred
#4. Language is power, in ways more literal than most people think. When we speak, we exercise the power of language to transform reality. Why don't more of us realize the connection between language and power?
Julia Penelope
#5. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
#6. The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.
Joshua Reynolds
#7. If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces ... It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.
Asger Jorn
#8. God is gracious beyond the power of language to describe.
Francis Asbury
#9. One of the benefits of being a mature well-educated woman is that you're not afraid of expletives. And you have no fear to put a fool in his place. That's the power of language and experience. You can learn a lot from Shakespeare.
Judi Dench
#10. The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time
is he who shall create poems in stone.
Louis Sullivan
#11. Comedy is something that we can all share, no matter what language we speak or our background, it has the power to unite us all.
Paul Goodman
#12. I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of ... that gives you a certain power over it.
Kate Grenville
#13. Music is the language of all. It tames the savage beast and allows us to get over heartbreak. It helps us express what we really want to say and it has the power to lift hearts and awaken our souls ... .
James A. Murphy
#14. His prose, like the thinking it reveals, is full of cloudy suggestions of something beyond the range of mere cognition. He has been given power, if not over the entities and dyads, certainly over the ignorant and superstitious.
Richard Mitchell
#15. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.
Yu Hua
#16. A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. A basic language-literacy of Nature is falling from us. And what is being lost along with this literacy is something perhaps even more valuable: a kind of language-magic, the power that certain words possess to enchant our imaginative relations with Nature and landscape.
Robert Macfarlane
#19. Anger is the fire of the soul, love is the language of the heart ...
Stephen Richards
#20. Language conveys a certain power. It is one of the instruments of domination. It is carefully guarded by the superior people because it is one of the means through which they conserve their supremacy.
Sheila Rowbotham
#21. The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality - with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any actions we take. In
Haruki Murakami
#22. It's kind of pathetic actually that we are all sitting here talking about Forth. It is not the wave of the future. It's never been the wave of the future. It's not within our power to make it the wave of the future.
Charles H. Moore
#24. In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
#25. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. The accusation of tyranny, however well-founded in fact, is dismissed unless it is delivered in the manner that power recognizes as powerful.
James S.A. Corey
#26. Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language
Munia Khan
#27. It is impossible to read this opening paragraph without an involuntary feeling of religious awe; it breathed the very savor of Gospel antiquity. The sincerity of the author heightens his power of language.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#28. Power doesn't just exist. It is threaded through different mechanisms of control. I'm interested in those complexities. But I want to address that in very forthright language and sometimes with images.
Barbara Kruger
#29. A mission without action is equally ineffective and futile as action without mission. Use the "power of precision," and remember language shapes thought and thought shapes action.
Archibald Marwizi
#30. There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.
Anne Waldman
#31. Your spirit is to be connected with your attention. Your spirit which is in your heart has to come in your attention. So who does the connection is this power which we call in Sanskrit language as Kundalini.
Nirmala Srivastava
#32. The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
#33. Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, "inner speech," and it is this that is indispensable for our further development,
Oliver Sacks
#34. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
William J. Mitchell
#35. What else is the power of melody but the power of feeling? Music is the language of feeling; melody is audible feeling - feeling communicating itself.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#36. If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.
Lionel Jospin
#37. It is a tragedy beyond the power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.
Andrea Dworkin
#38. Besides language and music mathematics is one of the primary manifestations of the free creative power of the human mind.
Hermann Weyl
#39. Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine
#40. Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
Paul Engle
#41. Love is the single most powerful and important word and notion in culture and language. Until the power of love supersedes the love of power we have no chance of ever being successful.
Bill Walton
#42. The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.
Marcus Du Sautoy
#43. Creation takes place through words, a series of 'And God Saids' bringing each new stage of life into being. Language is God's divine power made manifest in the world.
Myla Goldberg
#44. There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
Leon Wieseltier
#45. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#47. Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#48. So often what is really nothing short of a power grab is cast in the lofty language of 'progress.
Charles C.W. Cooke
#49. They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter's constant debasement.
Gilbert Sorrentino
#50. The British power is the overlord without whom Indian princes cannot breathe.
Mahatma Gandhi
#51. The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
#52. The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#53. I suggest that the emergence of descriptive language is at the root of the human power of imagination, of human inventiveness, and therefore the emergence of world 3.
Karl R. Popper
#54. It is only in grammar that the mighty can be bound by rules made by the humble
Agona Apell
#55. This I have observed: There are no language barriers in the Church. There is a mighty power that transcends the power of messages conveyed by words alone, and this is the power of messages communicated by the Spirit to our hearts.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#56. My passion is to open people's eyes to the sea using the power of photography as a universal language to convince the unconvinced among us that the oceans are fragile and finite.
David Doubilet
#57. There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
John Berger
#58. The language of sword is less powerful than the language of word, but most of
the people understand the language of sword with greater power than the
language of word.
Kedar Joshi
#59. The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.
Frantz Fanon
#60. Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife.
Kahlil Gibran
#61. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#63. TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.
Roseanne Barr
#64. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.
Alan W. Watts
#65. There is no man on this earth that has the right to tell you how beautiful you are, for no words we use has enough power to tell that truth. Your beauty can only be describe by the heavens above in a language none of us know.
Vincent Edwards
#66. I think it'd be pretty cool to fly. Actually, I'd like to be Language Gal. My super power is that I can speak every language.
Ilana Glazer
#67. We need language. We need language to tell stories. We need stories to create a self. We need a self because the complexity of the chemical processes that make up our individual humanities exceeds the processing power of our brains. The self we create is a fiction.
Mohsin Hamid
#68. What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
Sarah Dunant
#69. Music is a second language to my heart.
Mara Arps
#70. Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
Alexander P. De Seversky
#71. I think we use a lot of words and labels when trying to describe people: ones with autism, ones without autism. In general, I think that labeling people is a major issue, and people don't understand the power of language.
Nikki Reed
#72. Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.
Roland Barthes
#73. In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine A. MacKinnon
#74. It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.
Frantz Fanon
#75. Wordsmiths who serve established power ... castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.
John Ralston Saul
#76. In the context of fiercely monolingual dominant cultures like that of the United States, code-switching lays claim to a form of cultural power: the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language...Code-switching is a rich source of wit, humour, puns, word play, and games of rhythm and rhyme.
Mary Louise Pratt
#77. Language is the only chimera whose illusory power is endless, the inexhaustibility which keeps life from being impoverished. Let men learn to serve language.
Karl Kraus
#78. I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.
Paulo Freire
#79. Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.
Johann Georg Hamann
#80. The power of real debate is in the language and intellectual honesty of the debaters, alongside the engagement of spectators.
Ruzwana Bashir
#81. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#82. Money is a miraculous thing. It is your personal energy reduced to a portable form and endowed with power you yourself do not possess. It can go where you cannot go; speak languages you cannot speak; lift burdens you cannot touch with your fingers; save lives with which you cannot deal directly.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
#83. With software there are only two possibilites: either the users control the programme or the programme controls the users. If the programme controls the users, and the developer controls the programme, then the programme is an instrument of unjust power.
Richard Stallman
#84. P69- word is not the privilege of some few persons but the right of everyone
Paulo Freire
#85. Mock you!" repeated he earnestly, "no I revere you! I esteem and I admire you above all human beings! you are the friend to whom my soul is attached as to its better half! you are the most amiable, the most perfect of women! and you are dearer to me than language has the power of telling.
Fanny Burney
#86. There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.
Frantz Fanon
#87. That is the foremost fundamental law: language has the power to create reality. When spoken, a thing exists.
Claudia Serrano
#88. 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
#89. This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. It is said that life and death are under the power of language.
Helene Cixous
#91. There's no doubt in my mind that 'Slam' is going to be huge. It's a film about the power of language. People are going to see this and get blown away.
Saul Williams
#92. Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?
Ursula K. Le Guin
#93. The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#94. But like every kiss, this one is an answer, a clumsy but tender answer to a question that eludes the power of language.
Sandor Marai
#95. The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.
Lawrence Clark Powell
#96. The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.
Albert Einstein
#97. A good story or a book is all about it's power to hold it's readers still till the very last word of it's climax - complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!
Mehek Bassi
#98. Politicians are very experienced - maybe too experienced - at using body language to signal power and competence. But what these politicians are much more likely to struggle with, or just neglect to do altogether, is communicate warmth and trustworthiness.
Amy Cuddy
#99. Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ...
Jane Hirshfield
#100. Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
