Top 100 Power Language Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The power of nature exists in its silence. Human words cannot encode the meaning because human language has access only to the shadow of meaning.
Malidoma Patrice Some
#6. 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
#7. Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
Alexander P. De Seversky
#8. Music is a second language to my heart.
Mara Arps
#9. What was once the language of secrecy is now the language of power.
Sarah Dunant
#10. 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
#11. So our task as stewards of the word begins and ends in love. Loving language means cherishing it for its beauty, precision, power to enhance understanding, power to name, power to heal. And it means using words as instruments of love.
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
#12. 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
#13. 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
#15. The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.
Simon S. Tam
#16. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#17. Pop music has greater power to change people and to affect people because it's a universal language. You don't have to understand music to understand the power of a pop song.
Paul Epworth
#18. The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.
Frantz Fanon
#19. 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
#20. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C.S. Lewis
#21. If by fate anyone means the will or power of God, let him keep his meaning but mend his language; for fate commonly means a necessary process which will have its way apart from the will of God and men.
Saint Augustine
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Saint Francis of Assisi understood the power of faith put into action to change the human heart, for it was he who said, "Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words." We had not yet spoken a word in their language, but the village elders had already "heard" the gospel.
Richard Stearns
#25. A marvellous power of expression over language often distinguishes genius; but Shakespeare in his phrases seems independent of the bonds of language as of the bonds of metre.
George Edward Woodberry
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Every form of power comes down to language. In law, there's all kinds of words you don't know if you're not a lawyer and that gives them power. In business, it's the same thing.
Tony Robbins
#32. Language has not the power to speak what love indites
The soul lies buried in the Ink that writes
John Clare
#33. New concepts should be introduced by the power of imagery.
Douglas Coop
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. The view of life as a struggle for power generates a language in which life has no significance and only power matters.
Marilyn French
#39. It is said that life and death are under the power of language.
Helene Cixous
#40. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#41. That is the foremost fundamental law: language has the power to create reality. When spoken, a thing exists.
Claudia Serrano
#42. There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.
Frantz Fanon
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. For Milady was well aware that her most seductive power was in her voice, which could run skilfully through the whole scale of tones, from mortal speech, upwards to the language of heaven.
Alexandre Dumas
#48. The language of Mexicans springs from abysmal extremes of power and impotence, domination and resentment.
Carlos Fuentes
#49. If you want to conquer civilizations, restructure their languages.
Long time ago, even god used this strategy to rule over mankind.
Toba Beta
#50. 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
#51. If one believes that words are acts, as I do, then one must hold writers responsible for what their words do.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. 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
#53. Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language
Munia Khan
#54. In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
#55. Words have power. Use the language of leadership versus the vocabulary of a victim.
Robin Sharma
#56. Language was a code, like numbers, he said, and depended just as much on rhythm for its power
Blue Balliett
#57. Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.
Patrick Rothfuss
#58. We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.
Deborah Tannen
#59. All that has been integrated into NVC has been known for centuries about consciousness, language, communication skills, and use of power that enable us to maintain a perspective of empathy for ourselves and others, even under trying conditions.
Marshall B. Rosenberg
#60. There's a certain power in vague language, but I started to get more into the idea of really trying to have a discrete thought in the lyrics and to have songs that were about stuff - to try to make things more coherent.
David Longstreth
#61. UKIP trades in the language of fear and division; it seeks power in order to reject responsibility.
Robert Webb
#62. The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the below things. They are the ones who gave us one of the most beautiful words in our language, the word enthusiasm.
Louis Pasteur
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Language creates reality. Words have power. Speak always to create joy.
Deepak Chopra
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I met people that I couldn't talk to - they didn't speak Spanish or English - but they knew my songs. That's what I love, the music has gone past where I thought it would get to. That's the power of music, how it can travel and break language barriers.
Prince Royce
#71. The British power is the overlord without whom Indian princes cannot breathe.
Mahatma Gandhi
#72. As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.
Douglas Hyde
#73. 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
#74. So often what is really nothing short of a power grab is cast in the lofty language of 'progress.
Charles C.W. Cooke
#75. I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
W. H. Auden
#76. 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
#79. Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.
Leon Wieseltier
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Elegance of language may not be in the power of all of us; but simplicity and straight forwardness are. Write much as you would speak; speak as you think. If with your inferior, speak no coarser than usual; if with your superiors, no finer.
William P. Alford
#84. 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
#85. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#86. To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.
Michael Dirda
#87. Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
John Erskine
#88. 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
#89. The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.
Mark Pearce
#90. Right around my first year of college - I remember "Song of Solomon," by Toni Morrison, just moved me tremendously. The power of language and how it can peel back truths, bring things to the surface. So I learned a lot from fiction.
Barack Obama
#91. If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.
Lionel Jospin
#92. The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#93. There's a reason prophets perform miracles; language lacks the power to describe faith.
Mohsin Hamid
#94. 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
#95. Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown
#96. The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.
Cynthia Ozick
#97. I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul
George Crumb
#98. When you are challenging the young, they can come back at you with language of tremendous power and they are no respecters of sacred cows, you know, the young. There's nothing politically correct about the average young Australian when it comes to use of language.
Tony Abbott
#99. 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
#100. The author recognizes the power of the persecuting tribe referring to members of hers consistently as "snakes" or "roaches". This dehumanizing language, she realizes, seeps into the subconscious and makes it easier to forget that fellow humans were created in God's image.
Immaculee Ilibagiza
