Top 100 Linguistic Quotes
#1. Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#2. In my head, I was getting 'gangsta,' which I've always felt showed greater intent than getting 'gangster' in that it expresses a willful unlawfulness even upon its own linguistic representation.
Mat Johnson
#3. There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.
Peter Capaldi
#4. Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male?
Carol P. Christ
#5. Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks
admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.
Henry Miller
#6. Freud revelled in linguistic play, but, despite his appreciation of painting and especially sculpture, he did not know what to make of visual imagery in dreams.
Sigmund Freud
#7. There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.
Victor Pelevin
#8. Many of the most profound discoveries were reported to have come through intuition rather than sequential analysis processed by linguistic understanding.
Ilchi Lee
#9. It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's
concerns or the poet's truthfulness.
Seamus Heaney
#11. The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.
Marilyn Hacker
#12. No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.
Edward Sapir
#14. English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.
Roy Blount Jr.
#15. The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#16. The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.
John Wesley Powell
#17. It is merely a linguistic peculiarity, not a logical fact, that we say "that is red" instead of "that reddens," either in the sense of growing, becoming, red, or in the sense of making something else red.
John Dewey
#18. There a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?
Catherynne M Valente
#19. Linguistic research has shown that the passive construction has a number of indispensable functions because of the way it engages a reader's attention and memory.
Steven Pinker
#20. My picture-poems are linguistic margins on visual atolls.
Gunter Brus
#21. this type of analysis combines the three target-situation analyses (use, linguistic, and learning) and the present-situation analysis to
James Dean Brown
#22. For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.
Karen Russell
#23. Like physical events with their causal and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.
Ted Chiang
#24. For the first few months I went round in a linguistic fog. Often I only realized what someone had said minutes or even days or weeks afterwards.
John Mole
#25. The interests of the deaf child and his parents may best be served by accepting that he is a deaf person, with an elaborate cultural and linguistic heritage that can enrich his parent's life as it will his own.
Harlan Lane
#26. I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.
P.D. James
#27. Wait a second," he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, "doesn't this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn't things be different if nothing was an it?
Robin Wall Kimmerer
#28. A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.
Ferdinand De Saussure
#30. The more parents talk to their children, even in the earliest moments of life, the better their kids' linguistic abilities become
John Medina
#31. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.
Carl Sagan
#32. If only Queen Elizabeth II had the intellectual, political and linguistic skills of Queen Elizabeth I, many people would support giving her some of the powers of an elected president.
A. N. Wilson
#33. The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is nothing can well be more useless. Edward Sapir - 1924
Guy Deutscher
#34. Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.
Ilana Mercer
#36. We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history
Manuel De Landa
#37. He had walked on the beach and wished for icy winds to sweep away everything that sounded like mere linguistic habit, a malicious kind of habit that prevented thinking by producing the illusion that it had already taken place and found its conclusion in the hollow words.
Pascal Mercier
#38. Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.
Joseph Brodsky
#39. When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.
Madeline Miller
#40. Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#41. Simplicity may be simple, but like complexity it requires linguistic precision, and may therefore call for relatively obscure expressions at times.
John White
#42. My last experience of film-making was Tickets, a three-episode film in Italy, the third of which is directed by myself. It's not for me to judge whether it's a good film or a bad film, but what I could say is that nobody had a cultural or linguistic issue with what was produced.
Abbas Kiarostami
#43. What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.
Salman Rushdie
#44. Curious how these early linguistic abilities are so fragile, how unthinkingly and easily the brain lets them go.
William Boyd
#45. I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.
Kathryn Schulz
#46. You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.
Errol Morris
#47. I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
Daniel Alarcon
#48. Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?
Larry Wall
#49. Phillip, my articulate, sensitive, linguistic, emotional man, what do you have to say about how I look tonight? "Wow," he says, "you look ... hot, really hot.
Jillian Dodd
#50. But from a purely linguistic perspective, and as a rule of thumb, when two varieties of what used to be the same language are no longer mutually intelligible, they can be called different languages.
Guy Deutscher
#51. ( ... ) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
Steven Pinker
#52. Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.
Jorie Graham
#53. In the Middle East, the weak perish quickly and autocratic rule seems to be the most effective governing system to combat extremism and overcome so many tribal, religious, linguistic, and ethnic differences.
Zack Love
#54. The Devil fights from behind barricades of linguistic complexity, but the war of words will be won by those armed only with simplistic truths
Dean Cavanagh
#55. Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question.
Shlomo Sand
#56. The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.
Noam Chomsky
#57. The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.
David Crystal
#58. Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.
Paul De Man
#59. languages as Asians, who outnumber them nearly four to one.121 Linguistic diversity is not only a sign of cultural isolation and fragmentation, it contributes to the barriers
Thomas Sowell
#60. A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
Roman Jakobson
#61. Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.
Jonathan Franzen
#62. If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, then it would be truly strange if, in doing so, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#63. Just having an abstract conversation about linguistic parallelism.
Brandon Sanderson
#64. Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word "Frisco", which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of High Misdemeanour, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars.
Emperor Norton
#65. It is about time that, atheist or no, we call a spade a spade, and outed lies, and suspicious statements are placed against the backdrop of a linguistic litmus test.
Leviak B. Kelly
#66. But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen - to use an image you'll understand - it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact.
Brian Friel
#67. this lightness is something created in the writing, using the linguistic tools of the poet, independent of whatever philosophical doctrine the poet claims to be following.
Italo Calvino
#68. Corporate identity specialists spend their time rechristening other companies, conducting a legal search and a linguistic search to insure that the name is not an insult in another language.
Lisa Belkin
#69. When I made some observation about linguistic affinity and heredity and Freud - so obvious, I worried that I sounded like a philistine - Ana gave a startled, gargled laugh. Her already enormous eyes grew even wider. And I was immediately engulfed in a warm, prickly compunction.
Alena Graedon
#70. A crassly arbitrary method can be avoided only when it is accepted that etymological statements are historical and not authoritative and that semantic statements must be based on the social linguistic consciousness related to usage.
James Barr
#71. These politically correct language initiatives are misguided and harmful. They create highly entitled professional "victims" who expect to be free from any offense, and they engender a stifling atmosphere where all individuals walk on eggshells lest they might commit a linguistic capital crime.
Gad Saad
#72. There may be no more-radioactive term in the English language than what we now almost always refer to as the 'n-word' - itself a coy means of linguistic sidestepping that is a sign of how perilous it is to utter the thing in full, even in conversations about language.
Jeffrey Kluger
#73. Giving yourself the privilege of destroying other positions while parking your own position in an unidentifiable location is a form of linguistic terrorism.
Ravi Zacharias
#74. Not being categorized is like keeping your mouth shut. Categorization is linguistic, people trying to understand each other. Words are misty, language is a fog. I want to be in as many boxes as possible, describe myself as thickly as possible.
Kalan Sherrard
#75. [T]he hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples ... rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that.
Laura Kipnis
#76. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism
Paul De Man
#77. Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
Roman Jakobson
#78. Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
David Crystal
#79. We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism
Robert Hughes
#80. No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.
George Steiner
#81. I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.
Robert Burchfield
#82. If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.
Mahatma Gandhi
#83. Parallelism may be the only poetic device that can be fully translated from one language to another.? Thus the Bible, translated into hundreds of languages, maintains its original poetic form and effects in every tongue, a linguistic curiosity that is clearly God's design.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
#84. Storytelling draws on the magic of language to created Elsewheres. Writers use a linguistic sleight-of-hand to take an attribute, attach them to new objects, and create enchantment.
Maria Tatar
#86. Men don't need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words.
Helen Fisher
#87. Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#88. The central argument of structuralism is in essence a restatement of the discredited argument of linguistic positivism that language is the only reality since knowledge can only be expressed and communicated in linguistic form.
Simon Clarke
#89. Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.
Roman Jakobson
#90. Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents' attention.
Jeffrey Kluger
#91. Reality is symbolic. We build it using only the 26 symbols of the alphabet alongside images that speak to us on a linguistic level built from the 26 symbols of the alphabet.
Dean Cavanagh
#92. Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.
Henry Sweet
#93. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#94. 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
#95. A word's meaning depends not so much on its linguistic past but rather on the place the word occupies in relation to the general system of the language at the period in question.
Jean-Pierre Vernant
#96. Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.
John McWhorter
#97. The most appealing side-effect of Sri Lankan cricket from where I stand, shuffling words, has been linguistic.
Romesh Gunesekera
#98. Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.
Rebecca Solnit
#99. The most staggering linguistic turnabout for me is the one that equates green economy with 'sustained economic growth.'
Tim Jackson
#100. Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.
S.I. Hayakawa
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