I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time – for 40 years – and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Words are loaded pistols.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

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.

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.

Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, ‚One tear, right now,‘ that one tear would pop out.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

I have a very strict gun control policy: if there’s a gun around, I want to be in control of it.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.

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.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

Language is wine upon the lips.

Widespread use of antibiotics promotes the spread of antibiotic resistance. Smart use of antibiotics is the key to controlling its spread.

The more a person seeks security, the more that person gives up control over their life.

You know, one of the things I think you understand as president is you’re held responsible for everything, but you don’t always have control of everything, right?

Obscenity comes from grime.

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

I’m a human being and I fall in love and sometimes I don’t have control of every situation.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

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

Music fills in for words a lot of the time when people don’t know what to say, and I think music can be more eloquent than words.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

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.

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

Sure, women sportswriters look when they’re in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say ‚LOL.‘ Just what? But it means ‚laugh.‘ Why don’t you just laugh? What are you doing?

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.

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

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

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.

Language is the dress of thought.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

What we all want is public safety. We don’t want rhetoric that’s framed through ideology.

Obviously, I’m no fan of the radical left.

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

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.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

We have language and they do not. Chimps communicate by embracing, patting, looking – all these things. And they have lots of sounds. But they cannot sit and discuss. They cannot teach about things that are not present, as far as we know.

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone.

The universities are available only to those who share my revolutionary beliefs.

I spent my life studying communism and Soviet systems.

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

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

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

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

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.‘

Money has a language of its own.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

You can stroke people with words.