‚Do you spell it with a ‚V‘ or a ‚W‘?‘ inquired the judge. ‚That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord‘.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

If you want to talk about something new, you have to make up a new kind of language.

War is what happens when language fails.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

To use the same words is not a sufficient guarantee of understanding; one must use the same words for the same genus of inward experience; ultimately one must have one’s experiences in common.

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

I prefer to be in a video than to play with it.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

I used to be a great fan of doing crosswords. When you’re fiddling around with anagrams, you get wonderful jumbles of syllables that become interesting.

I grew up cursing a lot.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

I try to speak in a way that people can understand.

Y’all are so cute and y’all talk so proper over here. I love England.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

In doubtful cases the more liberal interpretation must always be preferred.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

Coffee is a language in itself.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I don’t like the intellectual label.

I don’t have a need for speed. I’m not that guy.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Language is wine upon the lips.

There is always another way to say the same thing that doesn’t look at all like the way you said it before. I don’t know what the reason for this is. I think it is somehow a representation of the simplicity of nature.

Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

My name can’t be that tough to pronounce!

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

I’ve been a lot more into Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, which was a bit complicated for me to understand the language of each social media, because they all talk in different ways. It’s a nice way for me to tell people I appreciate them, which I forget to do sometimes.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

Black men don’t like to be called ‚boys,‘ but women accept being called ‚girls.‘

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

As long as somebody finances you, can make a film and get it seen any place and in any language; then, hopefully, it’s a success.

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.

The way I talk is bizarre.