Top 82 Quotes About Semantics
#1. From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of
semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards
into life.
Thomas Ligotti
#2. When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.
Len Wein
#3. Is another universe bigger or smaller than the idea of God? Does it matter? If there is a sphere where 'angels' dwell, is it a matter of semantics whether we choose to call it Heaven?
Laini Taylor
#4. There are only two things in the world: nothing and semantics.
Werner Erhard
#5. The continuation that obeys only obvious stack semantics, O grasshopper, is not the true continuation.
Guy Steele
#6. The use of the high level language made each programmer a factor of 5 to 10 more productive in a coding sense and more concerned with the semantics than the syntax of modules.
Fernando J. Corbato
#7. Go home, Butch. I'm not going to do anything stupid." [Vishous to Butch]
"Stupider, you mean."
"Semantics are for shit.
J.R. Ward
#8. You speak of yourself and others who were in your same position as objects."
Boyd's eyebrows ticked up. "Isn't that what I am? I was merchandise there but now I'm back to being a tool. It's nothing but semantics.
Santino Hassell
#9. Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty
Charles Stross
#10. I think the semantics of mini-series for a network is that it has an end.
Cary Fukunaga
#11. Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.
Talulah Riley
#12. We indulge in semantics and slippery-slope rhetoric to excuse injustice. We read a few verse about women in a vacuum of literalism and prideful laziness.
Sarah Bessey
#13. It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.
David Riesman
#14. Nobody wants to say that the man [Obama] is a Marxist. Okay, so he's not a Marxist. He's a progressive! This is semantics.
Glenn Beck
#15. This was about more than semantics; it represented a dangerous shift in perspective.
Rio was not at war, I pointed out; and even if it were, wars have rules.
Juliana Barbassa
#16. The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.
Antonio Gramsci
#17. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflict.
Alfred Tarski
#18. I like to believe prayers aren't tethered to semantics.
P.C. Cast
#19. let's get our semantics straight. Story does not equal fiction, much less "lies." It's the world we Christians inhabit as "people of the Book." We are story people. All
Sarah Arthur
#20. Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next.
Shailene Woodley
#21. All forms of oppression carry their own semantics.
Judd Trichter
#22. There is something very curious in semantics, that the word 'meaning' is probably, in the whole language, the word the meaning of which is the most difficult to find. What does 'to mean' mean?
Anonymous
#23. From semantics to shipbuilding, from dream theory to propositional logic, any specialist ... is invariably astonished to discover that modern knowledge was foreshadowed at the time ... Should we not replace these foreshadowings by the study of the influences of Hellenistic thought on modern thought?
Lucio Russo
#24. All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Felix Frankfurter
#25. Philosophers who pay for their semantics by drawing checks on Darwin are in debt way over their heads.
Jerry Fodor
#26. Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they're all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again.
David Byrne
#27. I guess it's not the plan that counts, but the words in which the plan is wrapped. Semantics count for everything, and it's obvious that the resolute Republicans are better at semantics than the weak, flip-flopping Democrats.
Bruce Barnbaum
#28. We depend on various cultural forms-the syntax and semantics of English, the deliverances of modern astronomy-to know that the earth is round, but this in no way jeopardizes the objective circularity of the planet.
Douglas Groothuis
#29. If he'd had to judge based on the two of them, then ExtraOrdinaries were damaged, to say the least. But these words people threw around
humans, monsters, heroes, villains
to Victor it was all just a matter of semantics.
Victoria Schwab
#30. Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#31. We are getting into semantics again. If we use words, there is a very grave danger they will be misinterpreted.
H.R. Haldeman
#32. If you want to understand the nature of something, to find out the truth, that is one thing. If you want to play semantics, make up wild thought 'experiments', that is another thing. I am not so interested in the latter, though I do appreciate that it can be fun, however unproductive.
Patricia Churchland
#33. I think back to my dream of the boy, because in it I find solace. I like that word. I'm going to make it my word of the year. There is just something about that boy that makes me feel like I belong. Belong. Long to be. Weird word, but semantics aside, it is up there with solace.
Melina Marchetta
#34. Where are we? What happened?" Syn pursed his lips. "Which question would you prefer I answer first?" "You pick." "Where ... I commandeered a fighter." "You mean you stole it?" "Semantics, semantics."
- Shahara & Syn
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#35. Creative semantics is the key to contemporary government; it consists of talking in strange tongues lest the public learn the inevitable inconveniently early.
George Will
#36. The pervert."
"He prefers to think of himself as sexual deviant."
"Semantics.
Ilona Andrews
#37. I have no interest in anything so frivolous as the bona fide religion or mankind's pathetic debate over whose version of the church is correct. Circular arguments over the semantics of faith hold no interest for me. Those are questions answered only through death!
M.ralte
#38. Mr. Cosby wanted to do a show not about an upper-middle-class black family, but an upper-middle-class family that happened to be black. Though it sounds like semantics, they're very different approaches.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner
#39. Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.
Roman Jakobson
#40. With his eyes and those hands there won't be a woman safe in all the world when he starts hunting after the ladies.'
'Courting, dear,' my father corrected gently.
'Semantics,' she shrugged.
Patrick Rothfuss
#41. Semantics, Admiral. I'd appreciate an honest answer."
"I'd appreciate a multitude of honest answers, but I rarely expect to receive them." Miriam sighed; the verbal tete-a-tete was growing tiresome. Time to bring an end to it with, ironically, honesty.
G.S. Jennsen
#42. Where are we?" Nick shouted.
"I don't know, you're the nautical one. I just piloted the boat out of the harbor."
"Pirated! You pirated it out of the harbor!"
"Semantics.
Abigail Roux
#43. C is not clean - the language has many gotchas and traps, and although its semantics are simple in some sense, it is not any cleaner than the assembly-language design it is based on.
Erik Naggum
#44. Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.
Michael Robotham
#45. If we're for one another, we're feminists. The rest is semantics.
Betty Buckley
#46. The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
Tom Stoppard
#47. For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form.
LeCrae
#48. The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs [ ... ] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.
Robert W. Floyd
#49. Semantics are just some antics used by the enemy to get us distracted and off course from the destiny and inheritance that God hand-picked and created specifically for us...
Brandi N. Jefferson-Motley
#50. She was playing with semantics. I felt certain that she understood the word "tip" in English. She enjoyed pretending that she thought I wanted the Duchess to be upside down with her face buried in the sewage of some manhole while her beautifully shod feet waved desperate high-heels in the air.
Caroline Blackwood
#51. There's never been a better time to change the way you think. Replace every 'I can't' with 'How can I?' It might sound like semantics, but I promise it will bring whatever you want to accomplish much closer to becoming a reality.
Maynard Webb
#52. And often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on "college life" before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girl friends?
Grace Metalious
#54. An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.
Alfred Korzybski
#57. There is absolutely nothing feminine about the colour pink, or, anything bad-luck'ish about the colour black - in itself.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#58. Sentimentality and emotionalism have nothing whatsoever to do with love.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
#60. A major gap between many of the denominations stems from how people define some of the most basic terms, such as 'religion' itself.
Criss Jami
#63. Any proposition containing the word "is" creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.
Alfred Korzybski
#64. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.
Cormac McCarthy
#65. Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?
J.R.R. Tolkien
#67. If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68)
Jerry A. Fodor
#68. The definition of 'Employment' by an employer, and, that by an employee, are seldom the same.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#70. One man's modus ponens is another man's reductio, as epistemologists are forever pointing out (In Critical Condition, p. 70)
Jerry A. Fodor
#71. To a blind man, pawn shop and porn shop are one. To an unintelligent man, oversleeping and sleeping over are opposites.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#72. We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep to the real and the true.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#74. [Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.
Amos Tversky
#75. A theory of reality must not only explain reality, but also knowledge about that reality because knowing reality is part of reality.
Ashish Dalela
#76. He showed the words "chocolate cake" to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. "Guilt" was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: "celebration.
Michael Pollan
#79. In order to understand what happened, we'll use words in the way that they exist: as drawers of distinction between ideas.
John Hadac
#80. In societies where coolness and being cool is a top priority, the religious replace the word 'religious' with 'spiritual' to make their faiths seem less extreme.
Criss Jami
#82. Kevyn, Ennesby tells me you are building a time machine.
Actually I'm finished.
In one afternoon? Wow ... Does it work?
After a fashion.
...
I put a whole lot of energy into it, and the next thing I knew it was time for dinner.
-Captain Tagon & Commander Andreyasn
Howard Tayler
