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.

Coffee is a language in itself.

In the material sciences these are and have been, and are most surely likely to continue to be heroic days.

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.

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.

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.

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

To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.

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.

Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.

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

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

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.

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.

Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.

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

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. 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.

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.

If you look at the history of our country over the last 100 years, there have been periods where science and research have been celebrated. They were really kind of held up as heroes in society, which encouraged a generation of people to go into these fields.

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?

If you want to influence people, you want them to accept your suggestions, you don’t say, ‚You don’t know how to use the English language,‘ or ‚How could you make that argument?‘ It will be welcomed much more if you have a gentle touch than if you are aggressive.

Scientists are not delinquents. Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.

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.

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.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

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

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

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

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 work all day, do research, sketch my ideas, prepare for performances.

Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

Why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction and expenditure?

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest.

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

War is what happens when language fails.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

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.

Cosmology is a rapidly advancing field.

I grew up thinking that a research scientist was a natural thing to be.

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.

I will meet my countrymen. I understand only one language: that they are my countrymen, they are my brothers. You may see with whatever colour you want; Modi will not go into that colour.

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.

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.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

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.

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.

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.