Quotes About Plain Language

#1. Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress
in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Ken Wilber

#2. Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made this century, to the proposition that" - he had gone formal, but now he reverted to plain language - "race has no place in American life or law.

Ken Follett

#3. In your sales pitch use plain language, and as simply as you can, explain exactly how your service works.

Timi Nadela

#4. In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

Grace Paley

#5. If you can't describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven't got a plan. 'But,' people may say, 'I've got a complex strategy. It can't be reduced to a page.' That's nonsense. That's not a complex strategy. It's a complex thought about the strategy.

Lawrence Bossidy

#6. The logic of the rebel is to want to serve justice so
as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the
universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.

Albert Camus

#7. It is only when the mirror has not spoken to Chimpanzee in a plain language that it thinks it looks more better than the Gorilla

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

#8. In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.

Thomas Ligotti

#9. I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.

Charles Darwin

#10. There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

William Osler

#11. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#12. People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Neil Postman

#13. Sometimes if you state the plain truth in plain language, you hurt the other person, and you get hurt as well. We have to learn how to communicate.

Swami Satchidananda

#14. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

Werner Heisenberg

#15. I wondered if all of us churchgoers were just exhausted by grief. For the dying priest and us, I thought, "God" always refused to become glorious, instead stubbornly remaining plain, a headache, a sorrowful knot of language.

Virginia Heffernan

#16. When you catch an adjective, kill it.

Mark Twain

#17. For the most part, I think of PC as meaning Plain Civil. You treat people the way you'd like to be treated yourself, and that means not using language that is demeaning.

Jay Parini

#18. 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

#19. The arithmetic of love defied intuition: only when given away did it multiply.

Barbara Wright

#20. While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across.

Jean Little

#21. Which I wish to remark
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

Bret Harte

#22. I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#23. I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.

Thomas Paine

#24. A tale should be judicious, clear, succinct; The language plain, and incidents well link'd; Tell not as new what ev'ry body knows; and, new or old, still hasten to a close.

William Cowper

#25. Love is a child that talks in broken language, yet then he speaks most plain.

John Dryden

#26. It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anthony Doerr

#27. I stand and listen to people speaking french in the stores and in the street. It's such a pert, crisp language, elegant as ruffling taffeta.

Belva Plain

#28. Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Roger Ebert

#29. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#30. In plain proletarian worker's language, it takes two to tango.

Fred Hampton

#31. All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.

Lee Siegel

#32. Our government should speak a common language with the American people - plain English.

Alan Siegel