Quotes About Grammarians

#1. Grammatici certant et adhuc sub iudice lis est. - Grammarians dispute, and the case it still before the courts.

Horace

#2. The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

H.L. Mencken

#3. When a man is in love
how can he use old words?
Should a woman
desiring her lover
lie down with
grammarians and linguists?
I said nothing
to the woman I loved
but gathered
love's adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages.

Nizar Qabbani

#4. Language doesn't belong to grammarians, linguists, wordsmiths, writers, or editors. It belongs to the people who use it. It goes where people want it to go, and, like a balky mule, you can't make it go where it doesn't want to go.

Rosalie Maggio

#5. Caesar is not above the grammarians.

Tiberius

#6. Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

David Hume

#7. Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians

Russ Rymer

#8. The grammarians are arguing.

Horace

#9. Can it be, that the Greek grammarians invented their dual number for the particular benefit of twins?

Herman Melville

#10. Mathematics is a language. We want scientists to be able to read it, speak it, and write it. But we are are not training them to be grammarians.

Herbert Simon

#11. Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.

Dagobert D. Runes

#12. But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

Nick Hornby

#13. I wish you didn't have to design so often. Try to do quality and cut down on quantity. I think fashion is very, very important.

Vivienne Westwood

#14. Broken lines do not know what they want. With their caprices they cut time up, abuse routes, slash the joyous flowers and split the peaceful fruits with their corners.

Rene Crevel

#15. And language, ( ... ) is not just another faculty or skill, it is what makes thought possible, what seperates thought from nonthought, what seperates the human from the non human.

Oliver Sacks

#16. I am fascinated by this partnership between Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett. It's magic and I love it.

William J. Clinton

#17. You are not what you were born, but what you have it in yourself to be.

Liam Neeson

#18. There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.

Karl Kraus

#19. What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

Douglas A. Blackmon

#20. I lost my faith in God when I lost my daughter to Cancer, the beast. I begged, I cried, I offered my life for hers, and day by day, I watched that beautiful little Angel slip off. So, excuse me for not taking my seat next to you on Sunday in Church, I feel too cheated to worship.

Vince Neil