Quotes About The Use Of Language

#1. The use of language around drugs is really important. So we find that it's increasingly difficult in our society to find the word "drug" not connected to the word "abuse." The notion of a responsible use of drugs is written out in the language of our culture.

Graham Hancock

#2. The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

Simone Weil

#3. About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

Edsger Dijkstra

#4. One result of family failure has been the loss of dignity. No better example can be found than in the use of language. [Language has been reduced to] a four-letter word in movies, on television, in comedy routines, and in real life.

Billy Graham

#5. I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

Evelyn Waugh

#6. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Joyce Carol Oates

#7. Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

John Milius

#8. If Woody Guthrie set the bar for American songwriters, Bob Dylan jumped right over it. No one I know will ever come close to possessing the beauty of melody and the use of language that Dylan shares with us, with ease.

John Mellencamp

#9. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.

Edward Sapir

#10. I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

Daniel Woodrell

#11. Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

Ray Comfort

#12. Rhetoric is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic and continually born anew: the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

Kenneth Burke

#13. The mystery lies in the use of language to express human life.

Eudora Welty

#14. There is nothing quite as destructive to the gospel of Jesus Christ as the use of language that dismisses the way Jesus talks and prays and takes up instead the rhetoric of smiling salesmanship or vicious invective.

Eugene H. Peterson

#15. A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

Sherman Alexie

#16. In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Robert Morgan

#17. When people grow up in atmospheres of violence or atmospheres of poverty, they don't normally use hi-falutin' language to describe those things. They would describe some brutal event the same way we would describe getting a taxi or missing the bus.

Philipp Meyer

#18. I could write pages and pages about the delights of being a full-time housewife and mother and trying to write and support a family with two babies - but I don't use that kind of language in public.

Marion Zimmer Bradley

#19. I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet.That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners.

Jeff Stilson

#20. The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.

D.T. Suzuki

#21. The nation was founded and "dedicated," to use Lincoln's language in the "Gettysburg Address," to equality as a "self-evident truth." But this very principle of equality, as Lincoln also noted, was a "proposition." To make it a reality remained "the unfinished work" of Americans.

Ronald Takaki

#22. You cannot rise about your words. A lot of people use foul, pornographic, filthy, language and you SEE, all of those words paint pictures and they reveal the internal thinking of the person on the inside. YOU cannot RISE (forward, onward upward) above your words.

Zig Ziglar

#23. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#24. A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.

Mahatma Gandhi

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

Harry G. Frankfurt

#28. By bridging the literacy barrier through the use of 3D interactive models we overcome the inherent limitations of text. At the same time, language differences become much less important as text is replaced by interactive, 3D images.

Fay Chung

#29. Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Juan Pablo Galavis

#30. I read 'Sabella or The Blood Stone' by Tanith Lee, which was hugely influential to me. I love Tanith's writing. She's just really lyrical, beautiful use of language.

Holly Black

#31. It has enriched a tiny global elite that has no loyalty to the nation-state. These corporations, if we use the language of patriotism, are traitors.

Chris Hedges

#32. Of course language manifests a belief only if we use its words with the implied acceptance of their appositeness.

Michael Polanyi

#33. To use language is to enter into the territory of categories, which are as necessary as they are dangerous.

Rebecca Solnit

#34. I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

#35. Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

George Henry Lewes

#36. In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.

Arundhati Roy

#37. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Adrienne Rich

#38. You don't need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

Etgar Keret

#39. To use the language of a war correspondent, which was, she knew, what Isabel Jacobs happened to be, she would have to say thay Kitty Finch was smiling at her with hostile intent.

Deborah Levy

#40. I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Frantz Fanon

#41. Those who use the word 'lifestyle' are rarely in possession of either.

Fran Lebowitz

#42. Augusta created a magical object called the Interpreter Stone, and I came up with a simpler magical language to go along with it. So now, instead of reciting a difficult verbal spell, a sorcerer can use the simpler language to write his spell on cards and feed it to the stone.

Dima Zales

#43. The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

Donna Tartt

#44. For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.

Slavoj Zizek

#45. If you use the term 'over-exaggerate,' you know the definition neither of 'exaggerate' nor of 'over.

Rodney Ulyate

#46. A healthy self and an empty self are not contradictory; it just appears so because we use the same language to describe two different things. The whole path of meditation is about understanding that the self as an unchanging entity is a fiction, an illusory mental construct.

Joseph Goldstein

#47. Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

Evelyn Waugh

#48. If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.

Chris Crutcher

#49. Scared of words? I don't see why
anybody ought to fear words. Words are tools;
you have to know how to use them to get done
the job you want to get done. Can't do the work
if you're scared of the work.

Thylias Moss

#50. Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias ... Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready and able.

William Strunk Jr.

#51. I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Richard Rohr

#52. Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.

Ashwin Sanghi

#53. The liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society.

Manning Marable

#54. The Foundation has secrets. They have books, old books - so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and may use them.

Isaac Asimov

#55. 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

#56. The world was full of waistrels and waifs, sycophants and spies - all of whom put words to the wrong use, who made everything that was said or written suspect

David Levithan

#57. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#58. Christmas and the New Year are actually two holidays. So there is a plural, which in the English language, necessitates the use of 's.' I suppose you could say 'Merry Christmas' and 'Happy New Year,' but you probably have sh*t to do.

Jon Stewart

#59. I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#60. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

Frederick Buechner

#61. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Rebecca Solnit

#62. Senator, we just don't use that kind of language on the floor of the Senate.

Mike Mansfield

#63. In other words, all the highest aims of language are decisively the work
of God. They are decisively supernatural. And no amount of poetic
effort or expertise in the use of words can bring about the great aims
of life if God withholds his saving power.

John Piper

#64. Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

Jane Goodall

#65. Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Alfred Korzybski

#66. 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

#67. Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

David Lodge

#68. I don't know what is stronger or what is weaker.The whole language of strength and weaknesses is irrelevant,because when you use arms you do not use ballots, and public opinion is unimportant, and they shoot at their opponents.

Shimon Peres

#69. The Democrats are using the human trafficking bill's language that's been there for 40 years, regarding the use of federal funds for abortion.

Barack Obama

#70. [M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.

Stefano Benni

#71. Our investigation is a grammatical one. Such an investigation sheds light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away. Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#72. There is no man on this earth that has the right to tell you how beautiful you are, for no words we use has enough power to tell that truth. Your beauty can only be describe by the heavens above in a language none of us know.

Vincent Edwards

#73. I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Diane Wakoski

#74. When I need to be precise about a plant, I use its Latin name, even if my nongardening friends sometimes look at me a little funny for using big words in a dead language - or in the kind of horticultural Esperanto that botanical names make up.

Allen Lacy

#75. Any religion which uses the words such as hell, fire, curse, burning, amputating can never be a religion of love because a religion of love must only use the language of love, must only use only the sweet words of affection, not the words of darkness and torture!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#76. I thought why not write a kind of mystery, murder, thriller book, but use romance language where the language plays completely against the very dark subject matter, that very strange murderous plot, but use that Harlequin Romance language.

Chuck Palahniuk

#77. Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Noam Chomsky

#78. Any fifth language that you use should be equally used as just another bit of theater language, so that if you have a strong text, then the light should be as strongly part of that text as, for example, the sound it should be or whatever it is that you see.

Simon McBurney

#79. I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

Edward Hirsch

#80. Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.

Anne Fadiman

#81. Fiction writers learn about the development of metaphor, the use of rhythm, the way that language is compacted in order to express the feelings of - express their own feelings and the feelings of their characters.

Edward Hirsch

#82. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

Huston Smith

#83. Magic is another word that makes people uneasy, so I use it deliberately, because words they are comfortable with, the words that sound acceptable, rational, scientific, and intellectually sound, are comfortable precisely because they are the language of estrangement.

Starhawk

#84. To use biblical language, those who exchange the glory of God for something in creation will also exchange the image of God for something in creation - and because it is something less than God, it always leads to a lower view of humanity.

Nancy Pearcey

#85. I used to think that the great thing about sculpture was that, like Stonehenge, it was something that stood against time in an adamantine way, and was an absolute mass in space. Now I try to use the language of architecture to redescribe the body as a place.

Antony Gormley

#86. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.

Kwame Dawes

#87. The Holy Bible is the Language of Heaven; you cannot use the Language of the World to interpret the Holy Bible.

Felix Wantang

#88. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.

Virginia Woolf

#89. This little book aims to introduce the Thai language. It is intended for those who know nothing about it, but are keen to learn. We use the method of selecting 100 key words, and using these to make up sentences and present a range of expressions, so that you can "say 1000 things.

Stuart O. Robson

#90. (1) Use mathematics as shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done. (3) Translate into English. (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life (5) Burn the mathematics. (6) If you can't succeed in 4, burn 3. This I do often.

Alfred Marshall

#91. I've spoken with a few employers who have moved away from what has to be some of the least attractive language you could use about health risk to start talking about wellbeing.

Tom Rath

#92. This book [ "Win"] is based on the interviews with three dozen Fortune 400 - or Forbes 400, the richest people, and a couple dozen of the top CEOs.I wanted to know what language they use to be successful, and I wanted to know the attributes that could then be applied to the average individual.

Frank Luntz

#93. I'm bisexual, but it's not the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about ... I've slept with girls; I've slept with guys, so I guess that's what they call it! I'm not anti trying to use language to simplify our lives.

Amanda Palmer

#94. At the end of the second week they were still working and Arretapec, Conway and their patient were being talked, whistled, cheeped and grunted about in every language in use at the hospital.

James White

#95. I'm absolutely convinced of that. Israel is the representative of the United States in that part of the world. Its policies are so integrated with American policies that they use the same language.

John Pilger

#96. There are lots of actors who insist on speaking the lines themselves, and you hear the same thing from directors and the audience, but I don't think it's worth getting het up about. I think it makes more sense to use someone who speaks that country's language: that's what voice actors are for.

Tadanobu Asano

#97. The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

Marshall McLuhan

#98. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#99. As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

Noam Chomsky

#100. Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

Louis MacNeice