Politics Of Language Quotes

#1. ...it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils.

Ward Just

#2. Silence is the language of faith. Action--be it church or charity, politics or poetry--is the translation.

Christian Wiman

#3. 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

#4. Homosexuality is a cage in which you are trapped in an endless cycle of constantly wanting more - sexually - that you can never actually receive, constantly full of emptiness, trying to justify your twisted actions by politics and 'feel good' language.

Michael Glatze

#5. During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead.

John Frohnmayer

#6. A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics.

Zephyr Teachout

#7. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

#8. In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary, things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.

Aldous Huxley

#9. Finality is not the language of politics.

Benjamin Disraeli

#10. The new, old, and constantly changing language of politics is a lexicon of conflict and drama?ridicule and reproach?pleading and persuasion.

William Safire

#11. Each culture might lend its own dialect, but above all that is the language of music itself, and it doesn't care about politics or boundaries.

Geoff Zanelli

#12. Jokes are many things. 'Funny' is only one of them.

Melinda Chapman

#13. The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture, and the language that we use about politics, it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

Nick Clegg

#14. In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase 'hope and change,' to wit: 'big, fat government.'

P. J. O'Rourke

#15. If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

John Jay Chapman

#16. Photography is a universal language, transcending the boundaries of race, politics, and nationality.

Arthur Rothstein

#17. Faith and politics are now one and the same," he went on. "Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to have reached new extremes in our troubled century, do you not think? A man's religion tells me where his political loyalties lie, far more than his place of birth or his language.

S.J. Parris

#18. 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

#19. Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

Robert Lane Greene

#20. The language of politics is poetry, not prose. Jackson is poetry. Cuomo is poetry. Dukakis is a word processor.

Richard M. Nixon

#21. I am a very simple man. I am a man first, an artist second. My first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow man. I will endeavour to meet this obligation through music, since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries.

Pablo Casals

#22. We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

Jacque Fresco

#23. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.

Alice McDermott

#24. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#25. I was always the new kid, and I got to know the language and the politics of being on the outside, looking in. Never being in the clique - always being a student of the clique, a subversive, and I could look around and identify the other guys who were excluded.

Padgett Powell

#26. One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.

Hannah Arendt

#27. In such a society as ours the only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in the tactics of guerrilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language.

Kathy Acker

#28. Patriotism, currently, is nothing but the deadly evolution of narrow minded politics which has distorted language.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

#29. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

Gilles Deleuze

#30. I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

Dan Quayle

#31. Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

Alex Cox

#32. I've done reasonably well over the last 10 years because I took the strategy of language and politics and applied it to the corporate world, which has never been done before.

Frank Luntz

#33. George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

Arthur Levitt Jr

#34. Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

Richard Flanagan